The Franconia Notch Landslide
By Christian at Work
A LANDSLIDE took place in the Franconia Notch last summer, and rushed through the flume, “tearing out the famous bowlder like a straw, ripping great pieces of solid rock from the side of the flume, and greatly increasing its size, pushing on a tidal wave of solids. The body of the slide, which may have been 100 feet high and 500 long, was shot from the narrow flume as if from a gigantic cannon, the charge spreading out and covering a large area from ten to twelve feet deep, and in piles of twenty or thirty feet, and sending the largest rocks nearly to the bridge. Great rocks had furrows ground into them as they were forced along, while banks of glistening masses show that the terrible pressure reduced many of the bowlders to powder.” The event was one of a kind of which, if it had been prehistoric and some geologist of the evolutionary school had found a skull or a flint arrow-head at the bottom of the rubbish, he would have said that it must have taken 1,234,567 years or so to accomplish it; yet it all happened between dark and daylight of a June day, A. D. 1883.—Christian at Work.