breaking
off float in front like icebergs in a miniature Arctic Ocean, while the
avalanche heaps leaning back against the mountains look like small
glaciers. The frontal cliffs are in some instances quite picturesque,
and with the berg-dotted waters in front of them lighted with sunshine
are exceedingly beautiful. It often happens that while one side of a
lake basin is hopelessly snow-buried and frozen, the other, enjoying
sunshine, is adorned with beautiful flower-gardens. Some of the smaller
lakes are extinguished in an instant by a heavy avalanche either of
rocks or snow. The rolling, sliding, ponderous mass entering on one side
sweeps across the bottom and up the opposite side, displacing the water
and even scraping the basin clean, and shoving the accumulated rocks and
sediments up the farther bank and taking full possession. The dislodged
water is in part absorbed, but most of it is sent around the front of
the avalanche and down the channel of the outlet, roaring and hurrying
as if frightened and glad to escape.

SNOW-BANNERS

The most magnificent storm phenomenon I ever saw, surpassing in showy
grandeur the most imposing effects of clouds, floods, or avalanches, was
the peaks of the High Sierra, back of Yosemite Valley, decorated with
snow-banners. Many of the starry snow-flowers, out of which these
banners are made, fall before they are ripe, while most of those that do
attain perfect development as six-rayed crystals glint and chafe against
one another in their fall through the frosty air, and are broken into
fragments. This dry fragmentary snow is still further prepared for the
formation of banners by the action of the wind. For, instead of finding
rest at once, like the snow which falls into the tranquil depths of the
forests, it is rolled over and over, beaten against rock-ridges, and
swirled in pits and hollows, like boulders, pebbles, and sand in the
pot-holes of a river, until finally the delicate angles of the crystals
are worn off, and the whole mass is reduced to dust. And whenever
storm-winds find this prepared snow-dust in a loose condition on exposed
slopes, where there is a free upward sweep to leeward, it is tossed back
into the sky, and borne onward from peak to peak in the form of banners
or cloudy drifts, according to the velocity of the wind and the
conformation of the slopes up or around which it is driven. While thus
flying through the air, a small portion makes good its escape, and
rem