rayish-white gap that may be seen for many
miles. This is the head of the North Crawling Stone Valley. Twenty
miles to the right the big river itself bursts through the Mission
hills in the canyon known as the Box. Between the confluence of Big
and Little Crawling Stone, and on the east side of Little Crawling
Stone, lies a vast waste. Standing in the midst of this frightful
eruption from the heart of the mountains, one sees, as far as the eye
can reach, a landscape utterly forbidding. North for sixty miles lie
the high chains of the Mission range, and a cuplike configuration of
the mountains close to the valley affords a resting-place for the
deepest snows of winter and a precipitous escape for the torrents of
June. Here, when the sun reaches its summer height or a sweet-grass
wind blows soft or a cloudburst above the peaks strikes the southerly
face of the range, winter unfrocks in a single night. A glacier of
snow melts within twenty-four hours into a torrent of lava and bursts
with incredible fury from a thousand gorges.

When this happens nothing withstands. Whatever lies in the path of the
flood is swept from the face of the earth. The mountains, assailed in
a moment with the ferocity of a hundred storms, are ripped and torn
like hills of clay. The frosted scale of the granite, the desperate
root of the cedar, the poised nest of the eagle, the clutch of the
crannied vine, the split and start of the mountainside, are all as one
before the June thaw. At its height Little Crawling Stone, with a head
of forty feet, is a choking flood of rock. Mountains, torn and
bleeding, vomit bowlders of thirty, sixty, a hundred tons like pebbles
upon the valley. Even there they find no permanent resting-place. Each
succeeding year sees them torn groaning from their beds in the wash.
New masses of rock are hurled upon them, new waters lift them in fresh
caprice, and the crash and the grinding echo in the hills like a roar
of mountain thunder.

Where the wash covers the valley nothing lives; the fertile earth has
long been buried under the mountain _debris_. It supports no plant
life beyond the scantiest deposit of weed-plant seed, and the rocky
scurf, spreading like a leprosy over many miles, scars the face of the
green earth. This is the Crawling Stone wash. Exhausted by the fury
of its few yearly weeks of activity, Little Crawling Stone runs for
the greater part of the year a winding, shallow stream through a bed
of whitened bow