or three hours they return. The cook has been successful in bringing down a fat lamb. The unsuccessful hunters taunt him with finding it dead; but it is soon dressed, cooked, and eaten, and makes a fine four o'clock dinner. "All aboard," and down the river for another dozen miles. On the way we pass the mouth of Black's Fork, a dirty little stream that seems somewhat swollen. Just below its mouth we land and camp. May 26.--To-day we pass several curiously shaped buttes, standing between the west bank of the river and the high bluffs beyond. These buttes are outliers of the same beds of rocks as are exposed on the faces of the bluffs,--thinly laminated shales and sandstones of many colors, standing above in vertical cliffs and buttressed below with a water-carved talus; some of them attain an altitude of nearly a thousand feet above the level of the river. FROM GREEN RIVER CITY TO FLAMING GORGE. 127 We glide quietly down the placid stream past the carved cliffs of the mauvaises terres, now and then obtaining glimpses of distant mountains. Occasionally, deer are started from the glades among the willows; and several wild geese, after a chase through the water, are shot. After dinner we pass through a short and narrow canyon into a broad valley; from this, long, lateral valleys stretch back on either side as far as the eye can reach. Two or three miles below, Henry's Fork enters from the right. We land a short distance above the junction, where a cache of instruments and rations was made several months ago in a cave at the foot of the cliff, a distance back from the river. Here they were safe from the elements and wild beasts, but not from man. Some anxiety is powell-canyons-85.jpg BAD LANDS. felt, as we have learned that a party of Indians have been camped near the place for several weeks. Our fears are soon allayed, for we find the cache undisturbed. Our chronometer wheels have not been taken for hair ornaments, our barometer tubes for beads, or the sextant thrown into the river as "bad medicine," as had been predicted. Taking up our cache, we pass down to the foot of the Uinta Mountains and in a cold storm go into camp. 128 CANYONS OF THE COLORADO. The river is running to the south; the mountains have an easterly and westerly trend directly athwart its course, yet it glides on in a quiet way as if it thought a mountain range no formidable obstruction. It enters the range by a flaring, brilliant red gorge, that may be seen from the north a score of miles away. The great mass of the powell-canyons-86.jpg OUR INDIAN GUIDE. mountain ridge through which the gorge is cut is composed of bright vermilion rocks; but they are surmounted by broad bands of mottled buff and gray, and these bands come down with a gentle curve to the water's edge on the nearer slope of the mountain. This is the head of the first of the canyons we are about to explore--an introductory one to a series made by the river through this