Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1889-06-27
EFFECTS OF AN AVALANCHE.
The Force of the Irresistible Body of Snow and
Teo

Ice.
writer in the CornhilI Magazine says:
enjoyed an excellent opportunity last
March of inspecting the interior of a
StaUb Lawine or showing avalanche
which fell in the valley of Davos, below
the village of Glsrus. At its deepest
point it lay about 60 feet above the post
road. and gallery had been bored
through it with great labor for the
passage of sledges. The walls of the
tunnel were a com pact mass of compress
ed snow, which the workmen cut into with
pickaxes. You could make no impress
sion in it with your fingers, and the
marks of the pick were as sharp as on a
block OF marble.
noticed the following objects embed
ded in the portion of the avalanche ex-
posed to view: Large and small frag
ments of gneiss and limestone, occasion
ally a huge bowlder, trunks of trees,
mostly larch and pine, sawed flush with
the show walls; branches, innUmerable
twigs of cembra, larch, FIR, spruce and
alder SO evenly distributed over the whole
surface that the trees from which they
had been torn must have been ripped by
the whirl of wind and snowdust; these
fragments were SO firmly clutched that
you could not scoop them out; lastly, but
most impressive, massive blocks of pure
transparent ice, one of them six feet in
length, three feet in depth and how
broad do not know.
This ice must have been torn by the
blast from waterfalls in the gullies of
Rutchtobel. The avalanche probably
started at some 5000 feet above the Land
wasser, descending from district known
as the Ausserberg, which is dominated
| by the two peaks OF the Liedbachorn and
Aelphlihorn. 1t was clear on seeing how
stones, stems, branches, twigs, blocks of
| ice, ETC., were firmly wrought into the
snow mass that mans body would be
inextrioably clasped by the same frozen
substance. Standing in the gallery and
rejecting on these things 1 remembered
with a thrill of awe that somewhere or
another, at no great distance, the corpse
of a man lay actually imbedded there.
| He was called Caspar Valer, and he had
| been buried in the avalanche upon Feb
| ruary 7.
Gangs of peasants to the number of 80
bad dug necessarily for seven days In
| the hopes of alighting on his body. Pass
| ing along the road we had seen them at
| the stream side sounding the snow with
poles, breaking it up with pickaxes, and
delving into it with spades, and their sad,
re signed faces told how they sorrowed for
their comrade. His fate might be SO
easily theirs, too!
, The savage Alpine winter claims it's
victims yearly. Therefore, "holdie tibi
| cras mini, 9uod eras sum quod es gro"
Ito day for thee, to morrow for me; what
thou vast I am, what thou art shall
be) seemed written on their earnest fea-
lures.
At last this labor of the search, will
ingly and without wage given by the
men of Glarus had to be abandoned as
lmpracticable. Casper Waller was left to
slumber in his icy sepulchre until the
melting avalanche relaxed it's hold in
spring time. His widow, meanwhile, with
two young children, went on living IN
their chalet on the hill which overlooks
the dreadful thing which robbed her of
her husband.
On the Sd of May her husbands corpse
was brought to light. He had been car
| ried across the stream by the rush of the
Stawb Lawine and his body was in ex-
cellent preservation.