At least seven rockfalls and avalanches descended from Little Tahoma Peak, separated perhaps by only minutes or hours. The reddish-gray masses of broken and pulverized rock—some spread helter-skelter, some piled in long sharp-crested ridges—now lie on the valley floor between the White River campground and Emmons Glacier (fig. 20). The rockfalls might have been caused by a steam explosion near the base of Little Tahoma Peak. Steam jets and small explosions are not unusual phenomena at Mount Rainier, although they never have had such dramatic effects in historic time. Incredibly larger avalanches of rock fell repeatedly from the sides of Mount Rainier during prehistoric time. One such avalanche originated near the summit of the volcano and blanketed Paradise Park and Paradise Valley with a yellowish-orange mixture of clay and rocks sometime between 5,800 and 6,600 years ago. You can see this avalanche deposit in shallow cuts along trails and roads in the Paradise area. Huge blocks of rock that came down with the avalanche are scattered in the meadows of Paradise Park between the visitor center and Panorama Point. Although the deposit is now less than 15 feet thick in most places, the mass that flowed down Paradise Valley must have been 600 feet thick, because we can find remnants of it on top of Mazama Ridge. A tongue of the wet mass flowed through a low saddle near the south end of Mazama Ridge and extended into the basin now occupied by the Reflection Lakes. You can see the yellowish-orange deposit in the first roadcut west of the lakes, where it lies on top of gray glacial deposits. [Illustration: Avalanche deposits in the White River valley. The rockfalls and avalanches from Little Tahoma Peak formed a mass of reddish-gray rock debris that contrasts with the darker gray glacial debris deposited by Emmons Glacier within the last century. The avalanche deposits are about 1,500 feet across at their widest point. (Fig. 20)] The avalanche probably was wet when it crossed the Paradise area, and the moisture in it may have already been present in the rocks in which the avalanche originated. The mass was fluid enough to move down the Paradise and Nisqually River valleys as a mudflow hundreds of feet thick, and the resulting deposits extend at least 18 miles downstream from the volcano. The volume of rock that slid off to produce the mudflow may have been as much as 100 million cubic yards—or roughly enough to cover a 1-mile-square area to a depth of 100 feet.