January 5, 2009, Landslide

This is a rather poor photo of the landslide area above Racehorse Creek. It shows where the whole hillside came away, much of it sliding down into the creek and its valley to the left of the picture. Visible at the bottom of the picture is part of the jumble of vegetation, boulders and dirt. The mountain is formed of layers of soft carbonaceous shale and sandstone, which can be seen on the bare cliff left by the slide, and the side of the hill came away at one of the places where these layers met, the flat slope still visible and with little vegetation growing on it. The scale is difficult to comprehend here, but some sense of it can be gotten from the mature trees at the top of the slope. The cliff, from the bottom corner to the top, is around 350 feet. The slide happened on January 5, 2009, after days of warm rain and stormy weather, and two days later there was a flash flood in the creek below when the water of the creek broke through the temporary dam left by the slide.