Rockfall

“ A more lonely, dreary spot on earth could not be found. The rock is situated some three miles from any human habitation, in the midst of a dense and gloomy forest. All the paths leading to it are lined with deep ravines, some of them of frightful depth and filled with a mass of tangled roots and projecting bowlders. Just at the foot of Balance Rock an avalanche of stones has fallen, and these from time to time tumble headlong over the precipice with a thunderous crash. In awful confusion lie the rocks, forming such weird shapes as in the night are enough to fill with dread the bravest heart. ”

“ Once the rock is rotten and decayed, it yields readily to the forces of degradation, which drag it down—the beating of the rain, the rush of the avalanche or of the landslide, the tumult of the torrent, the quieter action of the muddy river in its lower reaches or the mighty glacier which transfers fine and coarse material alike toward the sea. ”

“ Here savage rock-grandeur and splendid sunlight{353} forever struggle for mastery of effect. A cloud drifts over us, and the dark headlands of granite loom up with impending mightiness, and seem to advance toward each other from opposite ranks; about their feet the wreck of centuries of avalanche, and above leaden vapors hurrying and whirling. All is dimness and gloom. Then overhead the clouds are furled away, and there is light—light joyous, pure, gloom-dispelling, before whose intense, searching vividness shadows unfold and mystery vanishes. ”

“ It was very hot work scrambling up that vast, debris-strewn slope, over smooth rocks which gave scarcely any foothold, twisting round great boulders or half-wading through loose sand, worn from the face of some steep, precipitous part by countless years of exposure—everything too hot to put one's hands on comfortably, and the sun always scorching on one's back. ”

“ But there are worse dangers in the mountains than falls of snow and ice, for sometimes masses of rock come hurtling down, or worse still, the whole side of a mountain gives way and spreads ruin far and wide. Perpendicular or overhanging rocks, which seem securely fastened, suddenly become detached and rush headlong down the mountain-side. In their rapid fall, they raise a cloud of dust like the ashes vomited forth by a volcano; a horrible darkness is spread over a once pleasant valley ”

“ Wild and desolate, the rock walls, which round themselves off to bald peaks, rise on both sides, and have their golden tops covered with coal-black stones, burnt, as it were, by the sun. The peculiarly solemn and dull character of this region always struck me the most when I rode after sunset over the unmeasureable rock rubbish which covers the earth to a great height, and is only interrupted by broad water-streams, which have formed themselves in the course of thousands of years, by the unfrequent, though not unknown storms, as experience has shown. ”

“ The slope toward our camp was too much broken into pinnacles and crags to offer us any hope, or to divert us from the single way, dead ahead, up slopes of ice and among fragments of granite. The sun rose upon us while we were climbing the lower part of this snow, and in less than half an hour, melting began to liberate huge blocks, which thundered down past us, gathering and growing into small avalanches below. ”

“ May the Lord preserve the traveller from a fall! At one place, the way is upon long beams introduced into holes made in [Pg 20] the rock, like a bridge, and covered up with earth. Brr!—At the thought that a little stone might get loose and roll down the slope of the mountain, or that a too strong oscillation of the beams could precipitate the whole structure into the abyss, and with it him who had ventured upon the perilous path, one feels like fainting more than once during this hazardous passage. ”

“ The grandeur of the views, and the ruggedness of the objects, in traversing a gorge which penetrates so many miles into the recesses of the mountain, may be imagined. Enormous masses of overhanging rock seem to be suspended above almost by a miracle; old pine forests hang upon the rugged cliffs; the torrent rushing by is spanned by bridges of snow, while huge unmelted avalanches lie in its bed below, cascades tumble from a hundred heights, while peaks, some dark, some snowy, many thousand feet high almost close overhead, and seem to jut into the sky. ”

“ If geological reasoning is not a delusion and a snare, age upon age had passed away before this took place; rocks had crumbled into dust, and their particles had been re-arranged; lightning had struck the peaks; frost had cleft their ridges; avalanches had swept their slopes; earthquakes had fissured the soil; and torrents had transported the débris far and wide,—had eaten into the clefts, had scored the slopes, and had deepened the fissures for an indefinite length of time. ”

“ Old mountain uplift; volcanoes built upon the plain of fiery lava; the chill of ice and wearing force of torrent, written in glacier-gorge and water-carved cañon!
I think such vastness of prospect now and then extremely valuable in itself; it forcibly widens one’s conception of country, driving away such false notion of extent or narrowing idea of limitation as we get in living on lower plains. ”

“ The rock when it first emerges from the water rises bare and rugged like a sea-cliff; no living thing, animal or vegetable, is harboured anywhere on its naked surface. In time, however, as rain falls upon its jutting peaks and barren pinnacles, disintegration sets in, or, to speak plainer English, the rock crumbles; and soon streams wash down tiny deposits of sand and mud thus produced into the valleys and hollows of the upheaved area. ”

“ The shattered fronts of walls stand out sharp and terrible, sweeping down in broken crag and cliff to a valley whereon the shadow of autumnal death has left its solemnity. There is no longer an air of beauty. In this cold, naked strength, one has crowded on him the geological record of mountain work, of granite plateau suddenly rent asunder, of the slow, imperfect manner in which Nature has vainly striven to smooth her rough work and bury the ruins with thousands of years’ accumulation of soil and débris. ”

“ Instead of the wide-spreading woods that usually hang round the skirts of lofty mountains, covering up their nakedness from the eye, nothing here was to be seen but masses of shattered rock, black as if scathed by volcanic fires, and heaped one upon another in a sort of wild confusion, as if some tremendous convulsion of nature had torn the hills from their foundations, and thrown them into primitive chaos. ”

“ Running through the rocky plateau is a huge crevice which looks as though it had been split in rage by the mighty fists of giants.
The streams thunder down in all their wild force over the boulders, hammer threateningly against the rocky walls, break into scintillating spray, rush round in whirlpools, and hurry on their course. And in close proximity to all this turmoil, the rocky walls stand unshaken in their immobility against the sky-line, an emblem of eternity cast in stone by the hand of God. ”

“ And the fearful rumbling continued and far down in the bowels of the earth, could be heard that great lake or river of molten rock and ore, rushing to the outlet which would free it; and the earth would tremble with the fearful fight of the mass as it surged and burned and crushed its way through its underground channels. Then again could be heard the hissing and blowing off of the steam as it escaped from the crevice in the crater. ”

“ These falls of rock take place from two causes: first, from the heat of the sun detaching small stones or rocks which have been arrested on ledges or slopes and bound together by snow or ice. I have seen such released many times when the sun has risen high: they fall gently at first, gather strength, grow in volume, and at last rush down with a cloud trailing behind, like the dust after an express-train. Secondly, from the freezing of the water which trickles during the day into the clefts, fissures and crannies. ”

“ The wind lightly brushes sand and dust over exposed surfaces of rock. Running water sweeps fragments of various sizes along its channels, holding them with a loose hand. Glacial ice grinds the stones of its ground moraine against the underlying rock with the pressure of its enormous weight. The wave hurls fragments of rock against the sea cliff, bruising and battering it by the blow. It also rasps the bench as it drags sand and gravel to and fro upon it.
Weathering of sea cliffs. The sea cliff furnishes the weapons for its own destruction. ”

“ Thus in all there are eight chief dangers: falling rocks, falling ice, snow-avalanches, falls from difficult rocks, falls from ice slopes, falls down snow slopes, falls into crevasses, dangers from weather. To select and follow a route avoiding these dangers is to exercise the climber’s craft.
Falling Rocks.—Every rock mountain is falling to pieces, the process being specially rapid above the snow-line. Rock-faces are constantly swept by falling stones, which it is generally possible to dodge. ”

“ The first object the eye rests upon, or rather is fascinated by, in the very centre of the picture is the fall itself, before which are two enormous barriers of steep, jagged, black rocks, forming a natural gateway to the fall. Over these, centuries ago, the water must have come; gradually, little by little, year after year, the irresistible rushing water has worn away those iron rocks into their present form. All the lower part of the fall is completely hidden in rolling clouds of spray, which rise far above the top. ”

“ Beyond Flatmark the valley broadens into a large basin, where the road and the river wind among a bewildering collection of boulders and great masses of rock, piled up in the wildest confusion, which during the flight of time, have been brought down by tremendous landslips. One would think that a great mountain had been split up, and its fragments scattered broadcast over the valley, and it seems the realization of chaos as one walks amid this maze of boulders, among which the river threads its way, lashing them with its foam. ”

“ A dim recollection of falling stones and dust showering round us—pieces of treacherous rock giving way in our hands and under our feet, bruising slides, and one desperate jump over the chasm between the cliff and the snow,—and there we were both, standing pale and breathless, straining our eyes for some scarcely expected trace of blood to give us hope. ”

“ I shall long remember the rude and characteristic wildness of the scenery which surrounded these falls; rocks piled on rocks, hung in rude and shapeless masses over the agitated torrents which swept their bases, whilst the bright and variegated tints of the mosses and lichens, that covered the face of the cliffs, contrasting with the dark green of the pines, which crowned their summits, added both beauty and grandeur to the general effect of the scene. ”

“ Torrents of water and avalanches of rock and snow spouted at intervals all along the cliff walls. Not a tree nor a vestige of life was in sight, except far away upon ridges below, or out upon the dimly expanding plain. Granite and ice and snow, silence broken only by the howling tempest and the crash of falling ice or splintered rock, and a sky deep freighted with cloud and storm,—these were the elements of a period which lasted immeasurably long, and only in comparatively the most recent geological times have given way to the present marvellously changed condition. ”

“ The top-heavy and the tottering ones are almost within reach; but there are slabs of rock that look like slices out of a mountain—I had almost said like slices out of a red-hot volcano; they stand up against the blue sky and the widespreading background in brilliant and astonishing perspective. ”

“ The middle of this dome overhung a terrible abyss. A block of ice thrown in fell from ledge to ledge, echoing back its stroke fainter and fainter. We had unconsciously sat for twenty minutes lunching and laughing on the thin roof, with only a few inches of frozen snow to hold us up over that still, deep grave; a noonday sun rapidly melting its surface, the warmth of our persons slowly thawing it, and both of us playfully drumming the frail crest with our tripod legs. ”

“ In the chasms left by the decay of the dykes between the vertical walls of their fissures, the winter snows linger into summer, and conceal with their thick drifts the mouldering surface of the once molten rock beneath them. On every side and at every turn a mute appeal is made to the imagination by the strange contrasts between the quiet restfulness of to-day, when the sculpture-tools of nature are each busily carving the features of the landscape, and the tumult of the time when the rocks, now so silent, were erupted. ”

“ On the right, the mass of stone, rock and boulder, rugged, broken and tumbled together, as if flung about by giants in sport, towered beyond the vision’s reach, 202 the caverns, abysses and hollows made the blacker and more impenetrable by the moonlight glinting against the protruding masses. ”

“ They rush down through every cleft to the depths below, they burst forth from every gorge, or plunge in mad career from rock to rock, forming waterfall after waterfall, and awakening echoes from the farthest mountain sides. ”

“ Paris Observatory. THE MOON.
The black shadows define the mountains, and tremendous mountains they are. Most of them [Pg 25] have craters. A crater is like a cup, and generally has a little peak in the middle of it. This is the summit of a volcano, and when the volcano has burst up and vomited out floods of lava and débris, this has fallen down in a ring a little distance away from it, leaving a clear space next to the peak, so that, as the mountain ceases vomiting and the lava cools down, the ring hardens and forms a circular ridge. ”

“ In this volcanic land one could not account for the fantastic and even monstrous shapes of cliff and ledge and overhanging rock masses without calling up some gigantic upheaval of all nature's vast play of forces ”