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Show CIEOLE VALLEYâ€"RHYOLITES AT MARYSVALE. 213 the Northern Markagunt, crowned by the Bear Peak and Little Creek Peak in the background. From Panquitch Canon the stream emerges into Circle Valley, which is much^smaller in area but far grander in sceneryâ€" indeed, the grandest of the High Plateaus. On the east rises the long palisade of the Sevier Plateau 4,300 feet above the river; on the west the wall of the Southern Tushar, which opposite the valley is 4,200 feet above it, and from 5,000 to 6,000 feet above it in its northern and southern extensions. The Tushar shows rugged peaks and domes planted upon a colossal wall; the Sevier Plateau shows a blank wall without the peaks. Very grand and majestic are these mural fronts, stretching away into the dim distance calm, stern, and restful. Yet they fail to impress the beholder with a full realization of their magnitude. This is true of mountains in general, but pre-eminently so of great cliffs. If one-third of the stuff in the Sevier Plateau, east of Circle Valley, had been used to build a range of lively mountains, they would have seemed grander and possessed what no palisade can ever possessâ€"beauty and animation. It is otherwise with the Tushar. There the great wall has magnified the mountains by giving them a noble sub-structure on which to stand, and the mountains have magnified the wall by giving it something to support. Twenty miles south of Circle Valley and just below the hamlet of Marysvale another considerable barrier lies across the valley of the Sevier. It consists of a mass of rhyolitic lavas, which broke out in the valley bottom in many eruptions, and now remain as a chaos of tangled sheets stretching from wall to wall. The river has maintained a canon through the mass right at the base of the spurs of the Tushar, whose front here is not mural but mountainous. Emerging from this barrier the river flows unobstructed through its main lower valley between the Pavant and Sevier Plateau until it darts into the former 70 miles to the northward. The valley of the Sevier is due to structure, and owTes to erosion only the canons which are cut throiigh the two barriers of volcanic rocks which have poured across it. The upper valley (Panquitch Valley) lies along the great displacement which has lifted the wall of the Sevier Plateau. Below Panquitch Canon, from Circle Valley to the mouth of Marysvale Canon, the valley platform is a block between two faults, with the Sevier Plateau |
