Titan of Chasms: The Grand Canyon of ArizonaPowell, John Wesley
History
Titan of Chasms: The Grand Canyon of Arizona
Powell, John Wesley
Grand Canyon (Ariz.)
Over the alcove sandstone there are 1,600 feet of limestone, in many
places a beautiful marble, as in Marble Canyon. As it appears along the
Grand Canyon it is always stained a brilliant red, for immediately over
it there are thin seams of iron, and the storms have painted these
limestones with pigments from above. Altogether this is the red-wall
group. It is chiefly limestone. Let it be called the red-wall limestone.
Above the red wall there are 800 feet of gray and bright red sandstone,
alternating in beds that look like vast ribbons of landscape. Let it be
called the banded sandstone.
And over all, at the top of the wall, is the Aubrey limestone, 1,000
feet in thickness. This Aubrey has much gypsum in it, great beds of
alabaster that are pure white in comparison with the great body of
limestone below. In the same limestone there are enormous beds of chert,
agates, and carnelians. This limestone is especially remarkable for its
pinnacles and towers. Let it be called the tower limestone.
These are the elements with which the walls are constructed, from black
buttress below to alabaster tower above. All of these elements weather
in different forms and are painted in different colors, so that the wall
presents a highly complex façade. A wall of homogeneous granite, like
that in the Yosemite, is but a naked wall, whether it be 1,000 or 5,000
feet high. Hundreds and thousands of feet mean nothing to the eye when
they stand in a meaningless front. A mountain covered by pure snow
10,000 feet high has but little more effect on the imagination than a
mountain of snow 1,000 feet high—it is but more of the same thing—but a
façade of seven systems of rock has its sublimity multiplied sevenfold.
[Illustration: A Panoramic View of the Canyon.]
Consider next the horizontal elements of the Grand Canyon. The river
meanders in great curves, which are themselves broken into curves of
smaller magnitude. The streams that head far back in the plateau on
either side come down in gorges and break the wall into sections. Each
lateral canyon has a secondary system of laterals, and the secondary
canyons are broken by tertiary canyons; so the crags are forever
branching, like the limbs of an oak. That which has been described as a
wall is such only in its grand effect. In detail it is a series of
structures separated by a ramification of canyons, each having its own
walls. Thus, in passing down the canyon it seems to be inclosed by
walls, but oftener by salients—towering structures that stand between
canyons that run back into the plateau. Sometimes gorges of the second
or third order have met before reaching the brink of the Grand Canyon,
and then great salients are cut off from the wall and stand out as
buttes—huge pavilions in the architecture of the canyon. The scenic
elements thus described are fused and combined in very different ways.
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