The Chinook may appear at any hour of the day or night. Occasionally with a rush it chases winter. Frequently and fortunately it follows a blizzard. Often it dramatically saves the suffering herds, both wild and tame, and at the eleventh hour it brings the balm of the southland to the waiting, starving birds. The Chinook wind is a Westerner. Similar though less far-reaching winds blow in the mountains of Europe and Asia. In the West, and especially the Northwest, it has a happy and important place, and the climate of this region cannot be comprehended without understanding the influence of the Chinook wind. Associating with Snow-Slides Associating with Snow-Slides Every snow-fall caused a snow-slide to rush down Bobtail Gulch. This run-off of snow was as regular as the run-off of storm-water. The snow which accumulated at the head of this gulch was a danger to the trail below, and if the snow showed the slightest hesitation to "run" when the storm had ended, a miner from a neighboring mine started it by rolling a few stones into it or by exploding a stick of dynamite near by. During my stay at a miners' boarding-house in the San Juan Mountains a heavy snow-fall came to a close. "Has the Greagory run yet?" inquired the foreman of one of the miners. "No." "Better start it, then." Ten minutes later fifty thousand tons of snow went plunging down Greagory Gulch. "This cabin will never be caught by a snow-slide!" said the prospector with whom I was having supper. "A slide hit my cabin in the Sawtooth Mountains. No more sleeping for me in the possible right-of-way of a slide! I sized up the territory before building this cabin and I've put it out of the range of slides." All this was encouraging, as I was to spend the night in the cabin and had arrived after the surrounding mountains were hidden in darkness. A record-breaking snow of eight days and nights had just ended a few hours before. During the afternoon, as I came down from Alpine Pass on snowshoes, the visible peaks and slopes loomed white and were threateningly overladen with snow. Avalanches would run riot during the next few hours, and the sliding might begin at any minute. Gorges and old slide-ways would hold most of these in the beaten slide-tracks, but there was the possibility of an overladen mountain sending off a shooting star of a slide which might raise havoc by smashing open a new orbit. The large spruces around the cabin showed that if ever a slide had swept this site it was longer ago than a century. As no steep slope came down upon the few acres of flat surrounding the cabin, we appeared to be in a slide-proof situation. However, to the north was a high snow-piled peak that did not look assuring, even though between it and the cabin was a gorge and near by a rocky ridge. Somewhat acquainted with the ways of slides, I lay awake in the cabin, waiting to hear the muffled thunder-storm of sound which would proclaim that slides were "running."