The Avalanche That Stripped the Mountain Bare

In February 2019, a backcountry guide named Erik Holsen was leading a group near Rogers Pass in British Columbia when they heard what he later described as "a sound like the earth clearing its throat." Across the valley, an avalanche broke loose from a ridgeline and began its descent. Thousands of tons of snow swept down the mountainside, snapping mature spruce trees like matchsticks, peeling bark from trunks, and scouring every living thing from the slope. The roar echoed off the surrounding peaks until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. His clients stood motionless, some weeping, unable to look away.

When it was over — and it lasted less than ninety seconds — the mountain stood utterly changed. What had been a dense forest was now bare stone and white silence. Erik said the quiet afterward was almost more overwhelming than the noise. "You realize," he told a reporter, "that the mountain didn't even notice."

Psalm 29 gives us a God whose voice breaks the cedars, strips the forests bare, and makes the wilderness tremble. The Almighty speaks, and the landscape rearranges itself. Yet the same psalm that begins with earth-shaking power ends with a single word: peace. The voice that commands avalanches is the same voice that whispers over His people, "I am giving you strength. I am giving you rest." The God of the thunder is also the God of the silence that follows.