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Show 302 stone barriers were pierced by narrow gorges, prepared these secluded and often beautiful spots in the midst of a rugged country for occupancy and utilization by man. The origin of these park- expansions along the courses of the streams traversing the Tertiary plateau may be attributable to the erosion of the softer arenaceous deposits, which are known to constitute horizons of considerable vertical extent in this formation. Grossing the high table- land to the north, which presents an open growth of handsome pines and an extensive pasturage extending eastward in a distance of about three miles, we gain the northern edge of the upland, where it suddenly breaks down into an extensive park- valley, which stretches several miles to the northward, and which is here and there occupied by shallow lakelets. To the left, the park is bounded by a rather abrupt ridge, along the crest of which rises a narrow, much-broken, dike- like escarpment, which is composed of the highly- tilted and metamorphosed Cretaceous sandstone, here nearly set on edge, the dip being to the eastward. To the north, this great dike- wall trends round to the northwestward, where it is lost to view behind the nearer escarpments. The ridge must attain the height of near 500 feet above the valley, of which perhaps 100 feet or more are made up of the nearly vertical escarpment, from the foot of which a steep talas-accumulation, covered by a sparse growth of pines and shrubs, and strewn with great blocks of rock, descends into the valley. On the east, a gradual ascent gains the summits of the bouuding Tertiary hills, which, however, to the north become more abrupt, stretching across the farther end of the valley in broken, flat- topped hills, of which there are several ( at least four) distinct terrace- levels, all sloping gently eastward. Their slopes facing the valleys are sparsely wooded, and often grassed over to the summit, but in the main they support quite a dense evergreen growth. Beyond the Tertiary plateau, which crowds into the bay- like recess around the trend of the hog- back ridge, the surface swells up in to a high undulating mountain- tract, from the summit of which, nearly twenty miles away in a direction a little east of north, those peerless cones, the Spanish Peaksj seem abruptly to spring. The isolation of these mountain- masses, lying some fifteen miles to the east of the main range, with whi. eh they are apparently connected by the elevated mouutain- plat* an, has much to do with the graudeur of their appearance, and which they always present, viewed from whatever direction. As seen from the plains in the valley of the Purgatoire, sixty miles to the east, they are blended in a single cone resembling, when clothed with snow, a pyramidal mass of cumulus resting upon the horizon. But approached from that direction, their double summits become more and more distinct, often flushed like a purple- tinted cloud; and, from the summit of the Raton Pass, their duality becomes fully established, and as seen from the highlands as far south at least as the Urac ridge, south of the Cimarron. Regaining the Upper Vermejo, whoso diversified park- scenery has lost nothing in interest by the brief sojourn on the other side of the Baton Hills, the trail leads across low hill- flats, through narrow shallow valleys, beside willow- fringed rivulets and ponds, out upon the upland rim ot the basin, amidstopen pastures dotted with piue, in whose branches families of pretty gray squirrels are busied garnering the season's supplies, and overhead troops of magpies take their vagaboudish flight A shallow depression leads by a gradual descent into the main valley, which we regain at an opeu space five or six miles below our former camp. Looking back up the valley, isolated flat- topped outliers of Ter |
