Grand Canyon of the Colorado

“ The Colorado is still deepening its gorge. In the Grand Canyon its gradient is seven and one half feet to the mile, but, as in all ungraded rivers, the descent is far from uniform. Graded reaches in soft rock alternate with steeper declivities in hard rock, forming rapids such as, for example, a stretch of ten miles where the fall averages twenty-one feet to the mile. Because of these dangerous rapids the few exploring parties who have traversed the Colorado canyon have done so at the hazard of their lives. ”

“ A good storm-cloud full of lightning and rain on its way to its work on a sunny desert day is a glorious object. Across the canon, opposite the hotel, is a little tributary of the Colorado called Bright Angel Creek. A fountain-cloud still better deserves the name "Angel of the Desert Wells"--clad in bright plumage, carrying cool shade and living water to countless animals and plants ready to perish, noble in form and gesture, seeming able for anything, pouring life-giving, wonder-working floods from its alabaster fountains, as if some sky-lake had broken. ”

“ It has infinite variety, and no part is ever duplicated. Its colors, though many and complex at any instant, change with the ascending and declining sun; lights and shadows appear and vanish with the passing clouds, and the changing seasons mark their passage in changing colors. You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. ”

“ The Colorado River during a vast period has cut almost a mile vertically through all of the great rock layers now exposed in the walls of Grand Canyon.
The width of the Grand Canyon, an average of about ten miles, has been brought about by the wearing and washing-in of its sides by natural processes of erosion. Rain, wind, frost, temperature changes and plant action have all combined to break down the Canyon walls. The soft rocks on the slopes are continually being broken and removed; the more resistant ones in the cliffs are undermined so in time fall down. ”

“ The Virgen, Kanab, Paria, Escalante, Dirty Devil, San Rafael, Price, and Uinta on the west, the Grand, Yampa, San Juan, and Colorado Chiquito on the east, have also cut for themselves such narrow, winding gorges, or deep cañons. Every river entering these has cut another cañon; every lateral creek has cut a cañon; every brook runs in a cañon; every rill born of a shower, and born again of a shower, and living only during these showers, has cut for itself a cañon; so that the whole upper portion of the basin of the Colorado is traversed by a labyrinth of these deep gorges. ”

“ The march of the clouds with their storm-banners flying over this sublime landscape was unspeakably glorious, and so also was the breaking up of the storm next morning--the mingling of silver-capped rock, sunshine, and cloud.
Most tourists make out to be in a hurry even here; therefore their few days or hours would be best spent on the promontories nearest the hotel. Yet a surprising number go down the Bright Angel trail to the brink of the inner gloomy granite gorge overlooking the river. Deep canons attract like high mountains; the deeper they are, the more surely are we drawn into them. ”

“ We are on the edge of the great prehistoric lake. The country is seamed with small, rocky gorges, which we cross. They are sometimes lined with scrub-brush, and made beautiful by many colored flowers. All these "draws" are tributary to Havasu (Cataract) Creek, but it is interesting to remember that most of them convey the drainage water away from the rim of the Grand Canyon until, by the subterranean channel before referred to, the stream is taken back to the Havasu Canyon and soon, deep, deep, deep down, some five thousand feet below the rim, is ejected into the muddy Colorado River. ”

“ Wherever one stands, at the eastern end of the Canyon, whether on the north or the south, on the promontories at the rim or on the plateaus beneath, it is the dominating and eye-compelling object. It is, without doubt, the most stupendous mass of nature's carving in the known world. It is seven thousand five hundred and thirty-seven feet above sea level, and over five thousand feet above the Colorado River, which practically laves its base. ”

“ Looking up the Colorado, the chasm through which it runs can be seen, but we cannot look down on its waters. The whole country is a region of naked rock, of many colors, with cliffs and buttes about us, and towering mountains in the distance.
July 29.—We enter a cañon to-day, with low, red walls. A short distance below its head we discover the ruins of an old building, on the left wall. There is a narrow plain between the river and the wall just here, and on the brink of a rock two hundred feet high stands this old house. Its walls are of stone, laid in mortar, with much regularity. ”

“ Thomas Moran marries these great characteristics, and in his infinite masses cliffs of immeasurable height are seen.
Thus the elements of the facade of the Grand Canyon change vertically and horizontally. The details of structure can be seen only at close view, but grand effects of structure can be witnessed in great panoramic scenes. Seen in detail, gorges and precipices appear; seen at a distance, in comprehensive views, vast massive structures are presented. The traveler on the brink looks from afar and is overwhelmed with the sublimity of massive forms ”

“ The “inner gorge” of the Grand Canyon appears to have been cut far more rapidly than the outer one, and at a much later period; were this not the case there would be no inner gorge. It is a singular fact that some side canyons, the Kanab, for example, while now possessing no running water, or at best a puny rivulet, and depending for their corrasion on intermittent floods, meet on equal terms the great Colorado, the giant that never for a second ceases its ferocious attack. ”

“ We may imagine the beginning of the titanic process that dug the millions of millions of chasms, big and little, contributing to the mighty Colorado, that dug the Grand Canyon itself, that reduced to the glorified thing it now is the enormous plateau of our great southwest, which would have been many thousands of feet higher than the highest pinnacle of Little Zion had not erosion more than counteracted the uplifting of the plateau. ”

“ Ever before us has been an unknown danger, heavier than immediate peril. Every waking hour passed in the Grand Canyon has been one of toil. We have watched with deep solicitude the steady disappearance of our scant supply of rations, and from time to time have seen the river snatch a portion of the little left, while we were a-hungered. And danger and toil were endured in those gloomy depths, where ofttimes clouds hid the sky by day and but a narrow zone of stars could be seen at night. ”

“ But there are scores of others which, though less grand, are hardly less beautiful. The exquisite colour contrasts of the Cheyenne canyons near Colorado Springs, Boulder Canyon near the city of the same name, Red Cliff and Eagle River Canyons near Red Cliff, Clear Creek Canyon near Denver—with walls at places 1000 ft. in height—the Granite Canyon (11 m.) of the South Platte west of Florissant, and the fine gorge of the Rio de las Animas (1500 ft.) , would be considered wonderful in any state less rich in still more marvellous scenery. ”

“ An account of the unique feat accomplished by two intrepid miners who, in frail row-boats, made a trip which has never before been performed in its entirety by water—a voyage down the rock-strewn torrent of the Colorado River, where it burrows thousands of feet below the surface of the earth in a series of tremendous gorges, the most famous of which is the Grand Canyon. Time and again the two men faced death in the boiling rapids, but eventually they emerged in safety after a journey of seven hundred and fifty miles, lasting over three months. ”

“ In the following passage a modern visitor notices the "dark and frowning" walls of the chasm, but still enlarges on their beauty:—"One would think that after traveling through six hundred miles of those canyons, one would be satisfied with beauty and grandeur, but in this fact lies the charm. Of the six hundred miles no two miles are alike. The picture is ever changing from grandeur to beauty, from beauty to sublimity, from the dark and frowning greatness of its granite walls, to the dazzling colors of its upper cliffs. ”

“ It appears that within the bottomless Ta-hoh or Great Canyon (see words 19 to 25) there is an illumination of torches (chuh) and a pulling up higher, or a dragging about and clinging to (yuen) .
Climbing is here referred to. The Sun people seem to have found locomotion difficult and hazardous within the chasm.
The modern explorer who reached the irrigated garden plots and houses of the ancient occupants, was himself compelled to resort to much climbing. ”

“ THE Grand Canyon is a gorge 217 miles in length, through which flows a great river with many storm-born tributaries. It has a winding way, as rivers are wont to have. Its banks are vast structures of adamant, piled up in forms rarely seen in the mountains. ”

“ It was on October 7th that they entered the mouth of the great gorge. At length “a full view, magnificent beyond description, of the walls of the Grand Canyon” was had, and they were fairly on the road; as rough a road, going down, as one can well imagine, but going up in the teeth of the torrential rapids, hemmed in by close granite walls, it is about as near the impossible as anything that is not absolutely so could be. ”

“ In the high, recently upraised Colorado Plateau of parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, nearly horizontal strata are being etched out, the result being numerous buttes, mesas (flat-topped hills and mountains) and deep canyons, including the Grand Canyon with its maze of peaks and pinnacles, many of them rising like mountains out of the canyon depths.
Mountains of the pure types just described are not the prevailing ones of the earth. ”

“ It is evident that the mighty stream which traverses the Great Canyon in the region beyond the Eastern Sea, should flow from a Bottomless valley to a Gulf, and reach to the Sun's Place. And we find that the current of the Colorado extends to the Tropical line of Cancer, which crosses and marks the mouth of the Gulf of California.
Vapor or fog is noticed in connection with the beautiful (even if restless or reeling) Yuen. ”

“ The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse. The Cyclopean forms which result from the sculpture of tempests through ages too long for man to compute, are wrought into endless details, to describe which would be a task equal in magnitude to that of describing the stars of the heavens or the multitudinous beauties of the forest with its traceries of foliage presented by oak and pine and poplar, by beech and linden and hawthorn, by tulip and lily and rose, by fern and moss and lichen. ”

“ The Formation of the Canyon. Now, in imagination, let us hark back to the day when this plateau was in the condition thus described. Nearly everything in the way of strata has been planed down to the Carboniferous rocks. The plateau is about at sea level. One great river already exists, with two arms, now called the Green and the Grand, the main river some day to be known as the Colorado. Slowly the uplift begins. It is a fairly even process, and yet there is slightly more pressure brought to bear under the southern portion, so that the whole mass has a slight tilt to the north. ”

“ Continuing through Stillwater Canyon, we pass Turks Head (figs. 23, 24) and head for the confluence of the Green River with the Colorado River. Figure 67 shows the canyon just west of the confluence. The lowest and largest cliff above the river is the upper member of the Hermosa Formation, overlain by the slopes and thin ledges of the Rico Formation. The massive sandstone at the top of the canyon wall is the Cedar Mesa. Junction Butte and Grand View Point are on the right skyline. ”

“ But it is impossible to conceive what the canon is, or what impression it makes, from descriptions or pictures, however good. Naturally it is untellable even to those who have seen something perhaps a little like it on a small scale in this same plateau region. One's most extravagant expectations are indefinitely surpassed, though one expect much from what is said of it as "the biggest chasm on earth"--"so big is it that all other big things,--Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Pyramids, Chicago,--all would be lost if tumbled into it." ”

“ Even the Grand Canyon itself is hardly more wonderful. To the right and below us lay the fair green fields of Toquerville, on the opposite side of the Virgen, and all around was such a labyrinth of mountains, canyons, cliffs, hills, valleys, rocks, and ravines, as fairly to make one’s head swim. I think that perhaps, of all the views I have seen in the West, this was one of the weirdest and wildest. From Berry Spring in this valley a party of us returned to the Uinkaret district by following the country to the west of the Hurricane Ledge. ”

“ In several parts of the world traces of great ice sheets—glaciers which scratched and eroded the surface—are found preserved in Algonkian rocks. In other places, including the Grand Canyon, ancient flows of lava are found where they gushed out upon the surface of an old land mass. Among the rocks below Desert View (Navajo) Point and bordering on the Colorado River may readily be seen several black cliffs formed by the volcanic activity of this early age. ”