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Show 299 extent. But at this point, in its broken- down condition, it has lost somewhat in the distinctive character which lends so picturesque a feature to its outcrop in other localities. Where the Vermejo breaks through the ridge to the south of the trail, in the walls of the picturesque little canon, the edges of the metamorphosed saudstone are finely displayed, steeply tilted beyond the vertical, with weathered niches and pinnacled crest. To the west, and parallel with the hog back, a belt of rolling country two or three miles in width is crossed, in which occasional outcrops of deep- reddish and variegated micaceous sandstone and beds of conglomerate are observed, gently dipping northwestward at an angle much less than the quartzite in the outlying Cretaceous ridge. Here the surface is rough, the soil poor, and covered by bunches of coarse herbage and a straggling growth of gnarled pines aud low undergrowth. Finally, the trail enters the gorge of the Vermejo at the foot of the range, and begins the ascent to the summit of the Costilla Pass amidst a wild confusion of rugged igueous masses, rent by a labyrinth of deep, narrow ravines. The walls of the passages are composed of a dark- brown vesicular, lava- like rock, with huge masses of greenstone, piled in irregular rugged ridges or isolated domes. A steep climb of about two miles, aud the trail emerges upon the high undulatiug mountain- meadows, which here occupy the summit of the range, wiuding through groves of aspen and spruce, and over grassy slopes, in whose bosom dark alpine lakelets mirror the sky. Our approach frightens up a few small teal, who seek refuge in the coarse grasses which grow around the peaty margins. The rude shelters and corral in closures, half hidden in the neighboring copses, give evidence of occupancy, during the summer months, by flocks which are driven from the valleys to graze the abundant pasturage, and which do much toward lessening the sense of the solitude that reigns around. The transition from the wild, chaotic belt to these open heights is sudden and unexpected; aud theuce to the summit the trail pursues a comparatively easy way over a rolling surface, apparently molded in the drift, to the sag or lowest point of the pass, where it attaius an altitude of 9,500 feet. To the north and south, the range rises hito somewhat higher wooded heights, and to the west the massive snow- clad summits of the Culebras rise out of a mountainous tract just beyond a little valley, which steeply descends to joiu the Rio Costilla in the basin of the Rio Grande. The snow- fields crowning the Culebras are in places deeply discolored, as though with dust. To the south, the eye wanders over a succession of wooded ridges, which reach down into the Eio Grande basin, fiually restiug upon the white crowns of the Bed River and Taos Mountains, tweuty to thirty miles away. But it is to the eastward we are mainly concerned, and here a revelation meets the gaze. In a broad gap, bounded by long, abrupt, spruce-clad mountain- spurs, whose sides have been devastated by the fires, lies the middle ground, filled by the massive undulations of the meta-morphic belt, and just beyond the great Tertiary plateau, whose surface is corrugated by the numerous tributaries of the Canadian flowing to the southeast, the plateau having a very perceptible general desceut in the same direction from its culmination in the watershed of the Raton Hills 011 the north. The intervening ridges often flatten out into level expanses, interspersed with an open growth of pine and extensive upland pastures. Iu the distance, the view is limited by the Chicorica Mesa, whose level summit, here and there interrupted by conical elevations resembling volcanic cones, stretches from Fisher's Peak far to the |
