Almost bought a farm in that same spot as the Nisqually vid except it was
a serac collapse. Nobody in their right mind climbs there.
Come to think of it I think I still have some booty from two guys who did
buy the farm right there* in a rockfall. We found their high camp long after
the fact; like 8 months as I recall so we didn't feel guilty cleaning up
the mountain.
MASS WASTING, like when the Altar-boy accidentally switches the communion wafers for blotter acid (tastes the same after all) and the whole congregation goes on a communal trip?
Back in the early 70s me and some buddies were rapping off a climb across from Elephant Rock. I was in the middle of a rappel and heard a crack of sound like thunder & lightning.....I figured that's what it since the clouds were low and it was misting, but I happened to turn around to see a huge ceiling (at least small house size) in mid-air coming off the Elephant. Earlier that day we had been looking at the clean scars from the earlier rockfall, imagining climbing around the new ceiling. This one washed a wall of water up from the Merced and over the hwy and brought debris back down and closed the road.
The greywacke rock in the Mt Cook area of NZ is truly some of the most unstable rock I have ever encountered. It consists of a combination of hard grey sandstone and darker coloured mudstone (argillite). These generally form alternating sequences with the sandstone being predominant, and together the sandstone and mudstone are often referred to jointly as "greywacke".
This has been posted already also but it's unbelievable.
i love the rocks and mts... dont' like rock slided of course, but
seeig them on film, is really powerful stuff to make you think
how such a huge mt, can, and is--so precarious in many ways...
cna't do youtube, or some of this, i'd like to see...
though--not the ones with folks in the midst of it-- :O
it just is really something the way these rocks set loose and move...
:O
Let us know!