Carbon Mountain

Again last week the innards of Carbon Mountain, a hill in the southwest corner of Colorado three miles south of Durango, churned and rumbled. Fissures opened in its slopes, oozed warm earth. Surface rock, amateurishly estimated as 25 million tons, avalanched down into Animas Valley to the north and might have rumbled on into Durango> did not Smelter Mountain intervene as a retaining wall. But Durango's citizens were calm. The breakup of Carbon Mountain has been going on since mid-December.

At that time the face of Carbon Mountain was a sheer cliff. Rock near the crest of the cliff, with slight forewarnings, cracked off, crumpled and crashed 150 ft. to the valley floor. Carbon's vertical face thus became a slope.

Geologists have paid curiously little attention to the event at Durango. Local men hazard diverse opinions. One supposes that coal beds deep within Carbon Mountain have ignited, generating gas which is bursting the mountain apart and forming cavities into which the mountain collapses. For evidence the burning-coal theorists point to a gas-like hissing which often accompanies a rock slide, to the sulfurous smell, and to pieces of shale charred red and yellow. On the other hand. Dr. S. Boyd Calkins, science teacher in the Durango high school, points to the earthy effusions which last week oozed from Carbon's cracks. These outpourings, he reasons, rose from, depths of 2,000 or more feet, definitely indicating seismic churnings along an earth fault which extends under Durango from Ute Peak in New Mexico to the Rocky Mountains.

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