The Mountain That Spilled a Flood
An eyewitness watches a mysterious, cataclysmic burst of water tear through a mountain ravine near Colville, obliterating trees and tracks.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Iron mountain, situated about ten miles south of Colville and on the east side of the Spokane & Northern railway near Sherwood station, was, on last Saturday, the scene of one of the most peculiar disruptions of nature’s accumulation of forces that has ever been known to this part of the country. Whether it was a waterspout or an accumulation of water in an immense underground reservoir will perhaps always remain a mystery. T. J. Patton, who owns a farm at the foot of the mountain, was an eye witness to nearly all that occurred. At 7 o'clock in the afternoon he heard a low rumbling in the distance, as of the approach of a railroad train. The sound was located in the deep ravine that skirts the north side of the mountain. Each time the echo sounded louder than before, until a great breast of water, fifty feet in height, came rushing out of the canyon. The flood carried rocks, mud and timber, strewing the debris over the valley for a mile in distance, covering up the railway track for several hundred feet. Trees three feet in diameter were snapped like toothpicks. A large clump of trees just above the residence of Mr. Patton was the only thing that protected his house from being carried away.
“A great breast of water, fifty feet in height, came rushing out of the canyon... Trees three feet in diameter in the path of the flood were snapped like so many toothpicks.”
While termed a 'mystery' in 1893, these events—often glacial lake outburst floods or debris flows—remain a geological reality in Washington's rugged terrain. Today, regional forest management and geologists better understand the volatile nature of these mountain slopes, though rural homesteads remain vulnerable to the same sudden, destructive forces of gravity and water.
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