Clouds' Rest descend like thunderbolts for more than
a mile.

The great century avalanches and the kind that mow wide swaths through
the upper forests occur on mountain-sides about ten or twelve thousand
feet high, where under ordinary weather conditions the snow accumulated
from winter to winter lies at rest for many years, allowing trees, fifty
to a hundred feet high, to grow undisturbed on the slopes beneath them.
On their way down through the woods they seldom fail to make a perfectly
clean sweep, stripping off the soil as well as the trees, clearing paths
two or three hundred yards wide from the timber line to the glacier
meadows or lakes, and piling their uprooted trees, head downward, in
rows along the sides of the gaps like lateral moraines. Scars and broken
branches of the trees standing on the sides of the gaps record the depth
of the overwhelming flood; and when we come to count the annual
wood-rings on the uprooted trees we learn that some of these immense
avalanches occur only once in a century or even at still wider
intervals.

A Ride On An Avalanche

Few Yosemite visitors ever see snow avalanches and fewer still know the
exhilaration of riding on them. In all my mountaineering I have enjoyed
only one avalanche ride, and the start was so sudden and the end came
so soon I had but little time to think of the danger that attends this
sort of travel, though at such times one thinks fast. One fine Yosemite
morning after a heavy snowfall, being eager to see as many avalanches
as possible and wide views of the forest and summit peaks in their new
white robes before the sunshine had time to change them, I set out early
to climb by a side canyon to the top of a commanding ridge a little over
three thousand feet above the Valley. On account of the looseness of
the snow that blocked the canyon I knew the climb would require a long
time, some three or four hours as I estimated; but it proved far more
difficult than I had anticipated. Most of the way I sank waist deep,
almost out of sight in some places. After spending the whole day to
within half an hour or so of sundown, I was still several hundred feet
below the summit. Then my hopes were reduced to getting up in time to
see the sunset. But I was not to get summit views of any sort that day,
for deep trampling near the canyon head, where the snow was strained,
started an avalanche, and I was swished down to the foot of the canyon
as if by enchantment. The wal