On safe footing at last, I followed along the bottom of the summit cliff and encountered the place from which the rocks had been hurled at me in the darkness and where a cliff had fallen to start the slide. It was evident that the storm waters had wrecked the foundation of the cliff. Ridges and gullies of the Bad Land's type fluted the slope and prevented my traveling along close to the summit at right angles to the slope. There appeared no course for me but to descend to the Little Cimarron River. Hours were required for less than two miles of painful though intensely interesting travel. It was a day of landslides,--just as there are, in the heights, days of snow slides. This excessive saturation after months of drought left cohesion and adhesion but slight hold on these strange sedimentary mixtures. The surface tore loose and crawled; cliffs tumbled. After counting the crash and echoing roar of forty-three fallen cliffs, I ceased counting and gave more attention to other demonstrations. On the steeps, numerous fleshy areas crawled, slipped, and crept. The front of a long one had brought up against a rock ledge while the blind rear of the mass pressed powerfully forward, crumpling, folding, and piling the front part against the ledge. At one place an enormous rocky buttress had tumbled over. Below, the largest piece of this, a wreck in a mass of mud, floated slowly down the slope in a shallow, moderately tilted gulch. This buttress had been something of an impounding, retaining wall against which loosened, down-drifting materials had accumulated into a terrace. The terrace had long been adorned with a cluster of tall spruces whose presence produced vegetable mould and improved soil conditions. On the falling-away of this buttress the tree-plumed terrace commenced to sag and settle. The soil-covered débris was well roped together and reinforced with tree-roots. When I came along, these tall trees, so long bravely erect, were leaning, drooping forward. Their entire foundation had slipped several feet and was steadily crowding out over the pit from which gravity had dragged the buttress. The trees, with their roots wedged in crevices, were anchored to bed-rock and clinging on for dear life. Now and then a low, thudding, earth-muffled sound told of strained or ruptured roots. The foundation steadily gave way while the trees drooped dangerously forward. United on the heights, the brave trees had struggled through the seasons, and united they would go down together. They had fixed and fertilized the spoil from the slopes above. This spoil had been held and made to produce, and prevented from going down to clog the channel of the Little Cimarron or making with the waters the long, sifting, shifting journey, joining at last the lifeless soil deposits in the delta tongues of the Colorado. But the steadfast trees, with all their power to check erosion and create soil, were to fall before the overwhelming elements.