| OCR Text |
Show 300 southeastward, where it merges into the haze obscured, flat- topped buttes and conical peaks in the region east of the Canadian basin. The latter is hidden from view by the high bounding Tertiary plateau, while the great mesa as effectually shuts out the view of the more distant plains. It is a region marked by long lines of parallel ridges, diversified by immense tableland and isolated volcanic cones, to which the mirage lends its illusory repetition of phantom mountains, which one moment are so real as almost to deceive, but the next to melt into strange fantastic shapes, until one can scarce believe they have augbt to do with things terrestrial, but rather strange creations of the sky. From the camp on the Upper Verraejo, a little valley leads by a gradual ascent to the summit of the Francisco Pass over the Baton Hills. In a distance of about four miles, the rise is about 900 feet, the snnimit of the pass being 8,600 feet in elevation, and situated just within the borders of Colorado. To the west, a rather high, rugged ridge, which is apparently composed of metamorphic rocks, possibly the tilted Cretaceous, continues for some distance along the valley, when it is replaced by the low Tertiary ridges, which latter continue to bound the eastern side of the valley to the- summit, often rising 300 to 500 feet above its bed, and in whose sides thin beds of lignite are known to exist. Looking back over the depression of the park country into which the little valley opens, one of the finest views of Costilla Peak is gained, which, from the north, presents a pyramidal outline, the abrupt northern face bastioned and rent by profound chasms reaching nearly to the summit, which rises between one and two thousand feet above the forest-line. Away to the southward, in a notch to the right of a prominent cone marking an angle in the watershed, or main range, the dome of Great Baldy just rises into view, mantled by a recent fall of snow. To the northwest, and quite near at band, the diverse and lofty summits of the Vermejo Mountains tower above the nearer hills; and north ward, overlooking a succession of low ridges with indications of narrow valleys and park- like openings similar to those south of the - pass, the Spanish Peaks appear; the eastern peak peculiar on account of its symmetrical, conical outline, the western and apparently highest mass arching up intaa jagged crest, which falls off in an abrupt descent to . the west. The lower hills flanking the broad basis from which the Spanish Peaks spring, and which pertain to the Tertiary plateau in its extension north of the Katon Hills, gently slope eastward toward the plains, precisely in the same manner observed in the plateau south of the Ratons. No considerable extent of the latter ridge is commanded from this point, the nearer eminences hiding from view as well the plateau extending southward. To the west, the Tertiary formation apparently abuts upon the metamorphic ridges in the near vicinity, aud which it may partially conceal. There is, however, marked dissimilarity in the accompanying topographical features here observed as compared with the great Colorado divide, with which the Raton Hills possess a marked resemblance in many other respects. Here there is no marked valley of erosion intervening between the Tertiary and the granitic mountain- wall, such as exists in the pass at the initial point of the Colorado divide; consequently, in the immediate vicinity of the Francisco Pass, the connection between these later sedimentary deposits and the older metamorphosed formations, as well as their relation to the granitic and igneous nucleus of the main range, is not so clearly manifest. Whether they extend over the Cretaceous hog- back, concealing its tilted ledges from view, or whether this ridge is curved to the westward |
