Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/300

296 from the crater. They all ran for their lives. Mr. Phelps hid under an overhanging rock, which sheltered him from the rocks which brushed past him as they fell. Lance Graham was a few feet away and was struck by a flying rock, which cut a great gash in his shoulder, piercing the thoracic cavity, and broke his collarbone. He was left on the mountain for dead for a time, but was afterward removed with great difficulty, and is now recovered. Another of their party ran down the mountain and, coming to a snowdrift, slid down the mountain like a shot. The cloud of smoke kept pace with him, and when he reached the bottom of the snowdrift he found a clump of bushes and, diving into it, buried his face in the snow to keep out the blinding smoke and ashes. The smoke is described as causing the blackest darkness, black as the darkest night.

The six photographs taken of this eruption by Mr. Loomis from a point at an elevation of about 5,000 feet and nearly six miles to the northwest of Lassen Peak are among the best that have been taken. The view reproduced in figure 2 is number three of the series and shows the steam and ash at about one half the height to which they were projected some ten or fifteen minutes later.

The writer’s first trip to the mountain since the eruptions began was made by the Southern Pacific railroad to Red Bluff, thence by stage to Morgan Springs, a resort nine miles southerly in an air line from the peak and located in a valley nearly 5,000 feet above the sea. The week from June 21 to 28 during which no eruption occurred was spent on the mountain or at its base. Some of the hot springs and solfataras at the base of Lassen Peak were visited on the twenty-first and found to exhibit no unusual activity (see Figs. 7 and 8). From June 23 to 25, rainstorms, with snow on the higher levels, prevented a visit to the crater, with any possibility of photographic work. On the twenty-sixth, and the twenty-eighth, the sky was clear, and the new crater was visited and photographed from various points of view. Both trips were made from the hotel at Morgan as a base. The ride on horseback to the foot of the volcanic cone proper at that time took almost four hours, the latter half being over snow from ten to twenty feet deep. After leaving the horses the climb to the top can be made in less than an hour. The new crater has frequently been described as being located on the south slope of the north peak; this peak, however, is merely a fragment of the northern portion of the walls of the ancient crater. The relations of the new opening to the old volcano are better appreciated by describing it as an opening not in the center, but on the north side of the much eroded bowl of the crater. The central depression of the old crater is probably over three hundred feet below the higher points of the old rim. The wall of the old crater has been deeply breached both on the east and on the west, and in summer the melting snow in the depression now drains westward, although there is not enough surface water to make any regular channel. Volcanic dust or “ash” from the different eruptions has been reported as falling from ten to twenty miles from the peak, the amount and direction varying with the wind.