August 5th, under clear skies as usual, we struck at once into a trail which for seventeen miles might have been a park bridle-path, a little steeper, and in places a little boggy. Our way took us east by north into Soda Butte Canyon, a mile wide below, and narrowing with a gradual rise, until at Miner's Camp it is quite closely bounded by high hillsides, the upper level of the trail being over eight thousand feet above the sea. The ride through this irregular valley is very noble. For a mile or two on our left rose a grand mass of basalt quite two thousand feet in height, buttressed with bold outlying rocks and presenting very regular basaltic columns. A few miles farther the views grew yet more interesting, because around us rose tall ragged gray or dark mountains, and among them gigantic forms of red, brown and yellow limestone rocks, as brilliant as the dolomites of the Southern Tyrol. These wild contrasts of form and color were finest about ten miles up the canyon, where lies to the west a sombre, dark square mountain, crowned by what it needed little fancy to believe a castle in ruins, with central keep and far-reaching walls. On the brow of a precipice fifteen hundred feet above us, at the end of the castle-wall, a gigantic figure in full armor seemed to stand on guard for ever. I watched it long as we rode round the great base of the hill, and cannot recall any such striking simulation elsewhere. My guides called it the "Sentinel," but it haunted me somehow as of a familiar grace until suddenly I remembered the old town of Innspruck and the Alte Kirche, and on guard around the tomb of the great Kaiser the bronze statues of knight and dame, and, most charming of all, the king of the Ostrogoths: that was he on the mountain-top. Everywhere on these hills the mining prospector has roamed, and on the summit of the pass we found a group of cabins where certain claims have been "staked out" and much digging done. As yet, they are as profitable, by reason of remoteness, as may be the mines in the lunar mountains. With careless glances at piles of ore which may or may not be valuable, we rode on to camp, two miles beyond--not very comfortably, finding water scarce, some rain falling and a great wealth of midges, such as we call in upper Pennsylvania "pungies," and needing a smudge for the routing of them. The night was cold and dewy, and our sufferers were wretched with sunburn.