Mount Shasta’s summit is 14,162 feet above the sea, but from about 12,000 ft. level the terrain is covered with perpetual snow and rock and circled by five large glaciers which are situated by the points of the compass from the summit rocks as follows: North slope, has Hotlum and Bolam glaciers, East slope has Wintoon glacier, West slope has Whitney glacier, and the South slope has Konwakiton glacier, which is popularly known as Mud Creek or McCloud glacier, as it is the source of the McCloud River.

In the winter of 1924, because of the light snowfall the glaciers were free of snow by the first of May, and commenced to melt and discharge large streams of water. Since the melting was mainly along the sides, the water ran under the ice and soon formed channels and undermined the foundations of the Mud Creek Glacier. By the end of June the bodies of ice commenced to break off at the lower ends and falling some hundreds of feet carried great masses of rock sand and gravel with them.

Observers stated that with sounds like the discharge of cannon, masses as large as an ordinary house would break off every two or three minutes and away they would go down the canyon. The resultant avalanches wrecked the McCloud water system, and made a great slope of glacial sand some seven miles long and a mile or more wide, with a depth of from five to thirteen feet and discolored the McCloud, the Pit and the Sacramento Rivers for miles from their sources.