_Monday, 31st_--We traveled thirteen miles through a pass where the hills were very rich in grass and fuel, and full of fine stone quarries. This pass was five miles from the river. Thence through a valley rich in grass and soil, beautiful and extensive, and abundantly supplied with fuel on its borders, but destitute of living streams, although the melting snows of its bordering mountains supply some streams which run a short distance at certain seasons of the year, and then sink. _April 1st_--Camp divided for convenience of travel, and General Rich and myself, with twenty-three wagons, traveled thirteen and encamped at a beautiful spring brook, among grassy hills, interspersed with cedar, like an orchard. Our road to-day led through a pass in the mountains by a gradual assent for about three miles, and then down very gradually for ten miles among hills, plains and little vales, more rich in bunch grass and cedar fuel, and more varied and beautiful than any other country I ever beheld. Every high hill, every dell, every vale or nook seemed richly coated with a living green of rich grass, and set about with cedars from twelve to twenty-five feet high, like an old orchard. Its northern bounds, limited by a rocky and barren range of high mountains through which we had passed. Its eastern limit was a snowy and timbered range, which divides between the valley where we were and the Sevier River, which heads in the south, near the rim of the Great Basin, in a beautiful salmon trout lake, surrounded with lofty pines and cedars, and runs in a northerly direction, till it sweeps round to the west and southwest, and forms a lake which is in view from our camp, and appears like a silver mirror at some thirty or forty miles distance. I arose in the morning, and with my large telescope viewed from an eminence the vast country before me. On the east the high mountain chains at several miles distance appears snowy and timbered, and pierced with gorges accessible for roads to be made to the timber; and giving rise to several streams which meander though this vast valley on our south and west, and enter the lakes or sinks in their own rich alluvials. To our southwest and northwest the view is almost boundless; consistent of a vast valley interspersed with fertile meadows, desert spots, known by their darker hues; lakes, rivulets, distinguished by the yellow meadow grasses and red willow streaks; and hills here and there dotted with cedars, and the whole bounded, in the vast and dim distance, by dark mountains not very high. Beyond which, at the distance of perhaps a hundred miles, appear other and more lofty peaks white with snow, and looking up like distant white clouds on the horizon.