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Show every lateral creek has cut a canon; every brook runs in a canon; every rill born of a shower, and born again of a shower, and living only during these showers, has cut for itself a canon; so that the whole upper portion of the basin of the Colorado is traversed by a labyrinth of these deep gorges. Owing to a great variety of geological conditions, these canons differ much in general aspect. The Rio Virgin, between Long Valley and the Mormon town of Schunesburgh, runs through Pa-ru'-nu-weap Canon, often not more than twenty or thirty feet in width, and from six hundred to one thousand five hundred feet deep. Away to the north, the Yampa empties into the Green by a canon that I essayed to cross in the fall of 1868, and was baffled from day to day until the fourth had nearly passed before I could find my way down to the river. But thirty miles above its mouth, this canon ends, and a narrow valley, with a flood-plain, is found. Still farther up the stream, the river comes down through another canon, and beyond that a narrow valley is found, and its upper course is now through a canon and now a valley. All these canons are alike changeable in their topographic characteristics. The longest canon through which the Colorado runs is that between the mouth of the Colorado Chiquito and the Grand Wash, a distance of two hundred and seventeen and a half miles. But this is separated from another above, sixty-five and a half miles in length, only by the narrow canon-valley of the Colorado Chiquito. All the scenic features of this canon- land are on a giant scale, strange and weird. The streams run at depths almost inaccessible ; lashing the rocks which beset their channels; rolling in rapids, and plunging in falls, and making a wild music which but adds to the gloom of the solitude. The little valleys nestling along the streams are diversified by bordering willows, clumps of box-elder, and small groves of cottonwood. Low mesas, dry and treeless, stretch back from the brink of the canon, often showing smooth surfaces of naked, solid rock. In some places, the country rock being composed of marls, the surface is a bed of loose, disintegrated material, and you walk through it as in a bed of ashes. Often these marls are richly colored and variegated. In other places, the country rock |
