Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1874 — An Avalanche on the Matterhorn. [ARTICLE]

An Avalanche on the Matterhorn.

Sitting there gazing at the 7,000 or 8,000 feet of the Matterhorn's height and breadth that were still higher than my resting-place, and drinking in the influence of the vast silent scene around and beneath, I perceived a movement upon the left-hand outline and a large surface of the adjacent front of the mountain. The upper fourth part apparently of the mountain’s height from the left-hand edge to about the middle of the front was already bare and black like solid rock. The movement of the mass, at the outset very deliberate, was first perceptible from the widening distance of the dark surface between its upper edge and a crest of bare rock that stood out upon the profile above. Then it was plain that the entire weight of snow for a thousand or two feet below on that side of the mountain and nearly to the midst of its front, as I viewed it, was moving; and I felt the strange, false sense of being lifted with the whole steep, mossy’ bank on which I sat facing the avalanche. Swiftly it gathered momentum and its immenrfty became more comprehensible when its greater part, fifty to a hundred

feet thick, shot out over a crag that had not been visible under this great thick nese of snow, and "down through the clear air in one vast sheet, striking upon a less inclined surface 2,000 feet below, where it was dashed into a mill- , ion fragments, and there flashed up a vast cloud of fine, dusty snow. Rapidly massing itself, it again- surged forth from the fleecy bosom of the snow- 1 cloud over a precipice of nearly vertical wall for a mile or more into its final j depths, leaving a large area upon the ; mountain black and barren, and tossing Upward throughout the broad abyss another and more widely spreading snowcloud, while its sudden displacement of air produced a rushing wind which reached to where I sat. As you first see the distant hrtilTcryV rushing smoke, and hear the roar, so liere arose, far beneath and a mile or two away, a rolling, white, misty cloud, and then the astounding thunder of the concussion. The interruption of this avalanche in its progress doubled its sublimity. -Had it rushed all the way down one incline, with no intervening crash between the i loosening of the mass and its plunge into the depths, or if it had shot oil clear into the air and struck into the very bottom in a solid .mass, it could not have carried with it such majestic movement of awful deliberation, nor produced such prolonged and terrific roar.— Cor. Detroit Tnbo ~