Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico); Grand Canyon (Ariz.); United States -- Discovery and exploration
When thinking of these rocks one must not conceive of piles of boulders
or heaps of fragments, but of a whole land of naked rock, with giant
forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or
thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that
shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes and
tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly
colored--buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate--never lichened, never
moss-covered, but bare, and often polished.
We pass a place where two bends of the river come together, an
intervening rock having been worn away and a new channel formed across.
The old channel ran in a great circle around to the right, by what was
once a circular peninsula, then an island; then the water left the old
channel entirely and passed through the cut, and the old bed of
the river is dry. So the great circular rock stands by itself, with
precipitous walls all about it, and we find but one place where it can
be scaled. Looking from its summit, a long stretch of river is seen,
sweeping close to the overhanging cliffs on the right, but having a
little meadow between it and the wall on the left. The curve is very
gentle and regular. We name this Bonita Bend.
And just here we climb out once more, to take another bearing on The
Butte of the Cross. Reaching an eminence from which we can overlook the
landscape, we are surprised to find that our butte, with its wonderful
form, is indeed two buttes, one so standing in front of the other that
from our last point of view it gave the appearance of a cross.
A few miles below Bonita Bend we go out again a mile or two
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MOENKOPI.
208 powell-canyons-139.jpg
ORAIBI HOUSES.
FROM THE UINTA TO THE GRAND. 209
among the rocks, toward the Orange Cliffs, passing over terraces paved
with jasper. The cliffs are not far away and we soon reach them, and
wander in some deep, painted alcoves which attracted our attention from
the river; then we return to our boats.
Late in the afternoon the water becomes swift and our boats make great
speed.. An hour of this rapid running brings us to the junction of the
Grand and Green, the foot of Stillwater Canyon, as we have named it.
These streams-unite in solemn depths, more than 1,200 feet below the
general surface of the country. The walls of the lower end of Stillwater
Canyon are very beautifully curved, as the river sweeps in its
meandering course. The lower end of the canyon through which the Grand
comes down is also regular, but much more direct, and we look up this
stream and out into the country beyond and obtain glimpses of snow-clad
peaks, the summits of a group of mountains known as the Sierra La Sal.
Down the Colorado the canyon walls are much broken.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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