There was no chance to dodge, no time to climb out of the way. The only hope of escape lay in outrunning the magnificent monster. It came crashing and thundering after me as swift as a gale and more all-sweeping and destructive than an earthquake tidal wave. I made a desperate start. Friction almost ceases to be a factor with skees on a snowy steep, and in less than a hundred yards I was going like the wind. For the first quarter of a mile, to the upper end of the gulch, was smooth coasting, and down this I shot, with the avalanche, comet-tailed with snow-dust, in close pursuit. A race for life was on. The gulch down which I must go began with a rocky gorge and continued downward, an enormous U-shaped depression between high mountain-ridges. Here and there it expanded and then contracted, and it was broken with granite crags and ribs. It was piled and bristled with ten thousand fire-killed trees. To coast through all these snow-clad obstructions at breakneck speed would be taking the maximum number of life-and-death chances in the minimum amount of time. The worst of it all was that I had never been through the place. And bad enough, too, was the fact that a ridge thrust in from the left and completely hid the beginning of the gulch. As I shot across the lower point of the ridge, about to plunge blindly into the gorge, I thought of the possibility of becoming entangled in the hedge-like thickets of dwarfed, gnarled timber-line trees. I also realized that I might dash against a cliff or plunge into a deep cañon. Of course I might strike an open way, but certain it was that I could not stop, nor see the beginning of the gorge, nor tell what I should strike when I shot over the ridge. It was a second of most intense concern as I cleared the ridge blindly to go into what lay below and beyond. It was like leaping into the dark, and with the leap turning on the all-revealing light. As I cleared the ridge, there was just time to pull myself together for a forty-odd-foot leap across one arm of the horseshoe-shaped end of the gorge. In all my wild mountainside coasts on skees, never have I sped as swiftly as when I made this mad flight. As I shot through the air, I had a glimpse down into the pointed, snow-laden tops of a few tall fir trees that were firmly rooted among the rocks in the bottom of the gorge. Luckily I cleared the gorge and landed in a good place; but so narrowly did I miss the corner of a cliff that my shadow collided with it. There was no time to bid farewell to fears when the slide started, nor to entertain them while running away from it. Instinct put me to flight; the situation set my wits working at their best, and, once started, I could neither stop nor look back; and so thick and fast did obstructions and dangers rise before me that only dimly and incidentally did I think of the oncoming danger behind.