The Daily Free Press

An Avalanche.

On Tuesday last a singular occurrence took place on Sugar Loaf Mountain, on the east side of the Hudson, near the north entrance to the Highlands. While at work in the vicinity, on Tuesday, James McManus, a railroad flagman, heard a singular rumbling noise, followed by a tremendous explosion. He ran a little ways south to ascertain the cause, and found the railroad track for five hundred feet covered with stones and boulders, and sunfish and perch. He looked up the hill and saw a hole three hundred feet in width and fifty feet in depth, and from it fully fifty thousands tons of dirt and sand had to all appearances been lifted up and hurled into and across the cove below. The cove is five hundred feet in width, and the avalanche swept through it and over it to the Hudson River Railroad track, tearing down fences and covering the track six inches deep with stones, dirt and fish. Huge trees were hurled in every direction, and the water the entire length of the cove was disturbed.

On Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning other explosions occurred—the last was followed by a torrent of water which burst from the bottom of the cavern, from where the earth had been hurled, and plunged down the side of the hill, cutting a ravine five feet deep in less than no time, and the volume of water is increasing hourly. When the fact is stated that there is no pond or stream near the spot, except one a mile back of Sugar Loaf, the sudden appearance of so large a stream of water from the bottom of a cavern fifty feet below the surface of the ground is remarkable. Trees thirty feet in height were carried to a distance of a thousand feet.

A dispatch dated Thursday says the amount of debris has greatly increased since Wednesday noon. A huge whitewood tree, a foot in diameter and fifty feet in length, has been hurled from the top of the hill a thousand feet, butt on, into the bed of the track, where it struck an immense boulder, which split it almost in twain. Now and then great masses of earth slide downward into a jumbled mass, damming up the water for an instant only, when it bursts from its confines with redoubled fury and passes onward to the cove beneath.