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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 185 lions, and for a time was not in accord with my environ ment. The land here is a desert, lifted 5,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level, and cut up into small mesas or table levels, into many ridges, buttes, gulches and miniature ravines carrying little vegetation. Flowing southward, into a winding channel, is the Lithodendron ( stone river), or, more correctly, creek. The valley of this river at a certain bend widens out to the east and west, form ing an alluvial depression whose banks and slopes are rugged, spurred and ravined. Here one enters the heart of the petrified forest, and the section known as Chal cedony Park. And now everything and the position of everything are startling. On the knolls, spurs and iso lated elevations, in the hollows, ravines and gulches, on the surface of the lowlands, piled up as if skidded by tim-bermen or flung recklessly across each other in heaps, lie the silicified logs in greatest confusion. Everywhere, with unstinted prodigality, the ground is sown with gems, with chips, splinters and nodules of agate, jasper and carnelian of all shapes and sizes, and displaying all the colors of the lunar rainbow. Buried in the sand hills rising above the valley to the west, are petrified logs squaring three and four feet at the butts which protrude from the beetling bluffs. Curiously enough, specimens from these trunks are not of agate color, but of a soft blending of brown and gray and absolutely opaque, while chips from the trees in the valley are translucent, and many of them transparent as glass. The state of mineralization in which many of these valley trees are found almost lifts them into ma terial for gems and precious stones, opals, jasper, ame thysts and emeralds. One of the most extraordinary fea tures of this marvelous region is the Natural Bridge, an |