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Show 78 EXPLORATION OF THE CANONS OF THE COLORADO. side gulches, in some places, steps have been cut. I can see no evidence of its having been traveled for a long time. It was doubtless a path used by the people who inhabited this country anterior to the present Indian races-the people who built the communal houses, of which mention has been made. I return to camp about three o'clock, and find that some of the men have discovered ruins, and many fragments of pottery; also, etchings and hieroglyphics on the rocks. We find, to night, on comparing the readings of the barometers, that the walls are about three thousand feet high-more than half a mile-an altitude difficult to appreciate from a mere statement of feet. The ascent is made, not by a slope such as is usually found in climbing a mountain, but is much more abrupt-often vertical for many hundreds of feet-so that the impression is that we are at great depths; and we look up to see but a little patch of sky. Between the two streams, above the Colorado Chiquito, in some places the rocks are broken and shelving for six or seven hundred feet; then there is a sloping terrace, which can only be climbed by finding some way up a gulch; then, another terrace, and back, still another cliff. The summit of the cliff is three thousand feet above the river, as our barometers attest. Our camp is below the Colorado Chiquito, and on the eastern side of the canon. August 12.-The rocks above camp are rust colored sandstones and conglomerates. Some are very hard; others quite soft. These all lie nearly horizontal, and the beds of softer material have been washed out, and left the harder, thus forming a series of shelves. Long lines of these are seen, of varying thickness, from one or two to twenty or thirty feet, and the spaces between have the same variability. This morning, I spend two or three hours in climbing among these shelves, and then I pass above them, and go up a long slope, to the foot of the cliff, and try to discover some way by which I can reach the top of the wall; but I find my progress cut off by an amphitheater. Then, I wander away around to the left, up a little gulch, and along benches, and climb, from time to time, until I reach an altitude of nearly two thousand feet, and can get no higher. From this |
