Turning back, we resumed our journey northward over the Elkhorn road, and passed through many miles of the most magnificent scenery to be found anywhere on the American Continent. The entire region is mountain infested, and to penetrate it by rail the road is compelled to follow the almost interminable sinuosities of creeks and broken valleys, with tunnels every few miles, and bridges quite as frequent. Through Fan-Tail Gulch the road winds in tortuous ways that sometimes draw grotesque figures, and in one place the road-bed is of the exact shape of a horseshoe, while on both sides of Elk Creek Cañon there are butting and pinnacled walls that suggest ruins of gigantic cathedrals, or monuments in a graveyard of Titans. Everywhere we turn there is the carving and hieroglyphic writing of the glacier and the volcano that in some age wrestled with the rocks and left them in a confusion of whimsical forms. Particularly is this true of Elk Creek Cañon, which presents many curious bluffs and isolated shafts of stone, worn into monoliths of oddity by wind and water. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: NEEDLE POINTS, NEAR HARNEY’S PEAK, BLACK HILLS.—These remarkable formations are prominent among the scenic wonders of the world, and if they were located in some older country and connected with legendary or historical incidents, would attract crowds of admiring tourists from the four quarters of the earth. These whimsical creations of the centuries, exhibiting as they do the severest contortions of nature, are remarkable, even to the point of being almost startling, but they are surrounded by, and are in the midst of, so many other tremendous upheavals, that they do not attract the attention which they deserve. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: CATHEDRAL ROCK, IN ELK CREEK CAÑON, BLACK HILLS.]