Up close, the grayish, topsy-turvy surface of Colorado's largest ever recorded rock avalanche yields small surprises that hint at the land as it was before; snail shells, Douglas fir cones, charcoaled wood, nubs of aspen shoots and intermittent clods of rich, brown topsoil. It is all tucked into 50 million tons of rock and debris that rumbled and raced down this draw on the Grand Mesa on May 25. This week, many of the experts who have been studying the slide, along with the county and national officials who have been monitoring it, and the landowners impacted by it - one an uncle of a slide victim - walked out on this slide together for the first time.
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