The Book of the National ParksYard, Robert Sterling
History
The Book of the National Parks
Yard, Robert Sterling
National parks and reserves -- United States
Here the canyon contracts, and we come to the comfortable hotel-camp,
terminal of the automobile journey. It is on the river side in a shady
alcove of the east wall near a spring. Here horses may be had for
exploration.
A mile above the camp stands one of the most remarkable monoliths of the
region. El Gobernador is a colossal truncated dome, red below and white
above. The white crown is heavily marked in two directions, suggesting
the web and woof of drapery. Directly opposite, a lesser monolith,
nevertheless gigantic, is suggestively if sentimentally called Angel's
Landing. A natural bridge which is still in Nature's workshop is one of
the interesting spectacles of this vicinity. Its splendid arch is fully
formed, but the wall against which it rests its full length remains,
broken through in one spot only. How many thousands or hundreds of
thousands of years will be required to wipe away the wall and leave the
bridge complete is for those to guess who will.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Douglas White_
EL GOBERNADOR, ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT
Three thousand feet high; the lower two thousand feet is a brilliant
red, the upper thousand feet is white]
Here also is the valley end of a wire cable which passes upward
twenty-five hundred feet to cross a break in the wall to a forest on the
mesa's top. Lumber is Dixie's most hardly furnished need. For years sawn
timbers have been cabled down into the valley and carted to the villages
of the Virgin River.
In some respects the most fascinating part of Little Zion is still
beyond. A mile above El Gobernador the river swings sharply west and
doubles on itself. Raspberry Bend is far nobler than its name implies,
and the Great Organ which the river here encircles exacts no imaginative
effort. Beyond this the canyon narrows rapidly. The road has long since
stopped, and soon the trail stops. Presently the river, now a shrunken
stream, concealing occasional quicksands, offers the only footing. The
walls are no less lofty, no less richly colored, and the weary traveller
works his difficult way forward.
There will come a time if he persists when he may stand at the bottom of
a chasm more than two thousand feet deep and, nearly touching the walls
on either side, look up and see no sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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