A Ninety-Foot Fall Down an Icy Mountain—and He Walked Away

William Wade, lately from Scranton, Pa., was recently thrown down a steep ninety-foot incline of one of the mountains on the headwaters of the Sauk, in Skagit county, but escaped without serious injury.

Mr. Wade and his friend, Charles Thompson, a tourist from Richmond, Va., had been in the Cascades for several days, trying to secure a few specimens of mountain goat. One morning, two weeks ago, accompanied by two guides, they began the ascent of one of the big spurs of the range, at an elevation of perhaps 6,000 or 7,000 feet. They followed a trail on the mountain side that led them across ice and snow, where footing was precarious, and a single misstep invited instant death on the rocks far below. At places along the trail the foremost guide cut notches in the ice so that the less experienced mountain climbers could pass safely. The most dangerous point was where the declivity fell away at an angle of nearly sixty degrees, and formed a straight shoot downward, with nothing to break the fall but slight benches at intervals of ten and twenty feet.

Mr. Wade was in advance of Mr. Thompson, and when he had nearly passed the dangerous point laughingly looked back, intending to speak to his friend. In turning he missed the last step, lost his balance, and sped like a shot from a gun down the icy mountain side. His horrified companions saw him strike the first bench sideways. The checking up given by the change in the course caused the body to bound, and Wade was thrown high into the air, his body turning over and over, bounding and rebounding, and finally disappearing under a projecting snowbank at the bottom of the gulch.

The few seconds that elapsed while this was going on seemed like hours. Mr. Thompson and the guides at once began to clamber down to the place where Mr. Wade had fallen, fully expecting to find nothing but a mass of crushed and bleeding flesh. To their surprise and amazement he was conscious. A hurried examination disclosed severe bruises on the left side of the head and a sprained ankle.

With infinite difficulty the injured man was carried and dragged by a roundabout way to the trail, and thence to the camp, some miles distant on the south fork of the Sauk. After a few days' rest he and Mr. Thompson started for this city, and traveling by easy stages reached here day before yesterday. Mr. Wade's ankle will not yet bear his weight, and his head is still bandaged. Nevertheless, he and Mr. Thompson left last night for Tacoma where they will rest a few days before going East.