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Show WATER POCKET FOLDâ€"INCONSEQUENT DRAINAGE. 287 Everything visible tells of ruin and decay. It is the extreme of desolation, the blankest solitude, a superlative desert. To the northeastward the radius of vision reaches out perhaps a hundred miles, where everything gradually fades into dreamland, where the air boils like a pot, and objects are just what our fancy chooses to make them. Perhaps the most striking part of the picture is in the middle ground, where the great Water Pocket fold turns up the truncated beds of the Trias and Jura, whose edges face us from a great quadrant of which we occupy the center. Where the strata are cut off in this way upon the slope of a monocline they do not present to the front a common cliff and talus with a straight crest-line, but a row of cusps like a battery of shark's teeth on a large scale. But even in this relation the Jurassic sandstone is peculiar, for it is here of enormous thickness and so massive that it is virtually one homogenous bed, and the great gashes cut across the fold or perpendicular to the face of the outcrop have carved the stratum into colossal crags and domes. By these tokens we can trace the Water Pocket fold from the eastern slopes of Thousand Lake Mountain around a quadrant, whence its course flies off in a tangent far into the south and is lost to view beyond the Colorado. Its total length thus displayed must be about DO miles. Across this monocline run the drainage channels which head in the amphitheaters along the eastern front of the Aquarius. It is interesting to note how completely independent are these streams of the structural slopes of the country. They rush into a cliff or into a rising slope of the strata as if they were only banks of fog or smoke. It matters not which way the strata dip, the streams have ways of their own. The Fremont River and the creeks which flow down from Thousand Lake Mountain present a very striking relation to the strata. They at first run very obliquely into the fold, and thence by an equally oblique course ran out of it again. Nearer to us Temple Creek plunges right into the flexure perpendicular to its strike and in the somewhat uncommon relation of a stream running with the dip of the strata. Still nearer, Tantalus Creek runs across the fold in the same general relation but meanders about within it. In the first chapter I have explained this independence of drainage channels of the structural slopes and attitudes of the strata by the general |