Clingman’s observations are readily understandable in the context of landslides, and I have tried to connect them with details of the slide that are visible in lidar imagery and comparable features on a modern slide in the region. The image below, from the same Rutherford County slide that hosts the lateral crack, shows a large depression with adjacent rotated blocks, whose movement has caused tilting of a large tree at left. Perhaps the most interesting question relating to Split Mountain is whether the “shocks” referenced by Clingman and local residents describe the slide events themselves, which appear to have been surprisingly rapid for a somewhat intact slide, or small earthquakes that led to the slide events.