One object of special interest in the park is the National Bridge, a petrified trunk which spans a chasm thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep. The part of the trunk crossing the gulch lies diagonally and is forty-four feet long. The length of the trunk exposed by erosion is one hundred and eleven feet; a fraction still remains embedded in the sandstone. The ruins of several ancient Indian pueblos are scattered about the park, nearly all of them built of logs of this richly colored, agatized wood. The forest was a storehouse for ages, whence primitive men obtained material from which to make agate hammers, arrow-heads, and knives, as is shown by implements found hundreds of miles distant from these quarries. CHAPTER V DEATH VALLEY Death Valley, or the Arroyo del Muerte, as the Spanish called it, is in the western part of southern California, near the oblique boundary of Nevada, a little way north of Nevada's vanishing point. Nowadays one may ride almost into the valley in a Pullman coach. From Daggett, a forsaken station of the Santa Fe Railroad, a "jerkwater" road, as it is called, extends northward to Goldfield and Tonopah, and this road takes one almost as the crow flies to the edge of the valley of the ominous name. Even in a Pullman coach the trip is trying to both body and soul. But forty years ago?--well, that is a different story. Then there was no Santa Fe Railway, and no Daggett--just a wide stretch of desert dotted with yucca and Spanish bayonet. Prospectors and pack-trains had left trails here and there. One of these, now a wagon-road, lay southward to San Bernardino; northward it lost itself in the desert toward Candelaria. The region possesses some names that are a trifle paradoxical. For instances, there are the Black Mountains, the grayish red color of which belies their name. Then there is Funeral Range, which, far from being sombre in aspect, is most brilliantly colored. To the southward is Paradise Valley, a plain desert strewn with greasewood and chamiso; and down in the floor of Death Valley is, or rather was, Greenland. But Greenland is not a waste of icebound coldness; on the contrary, it is averred by the laborers in the borax fields to be several degrees hotter than any other place on earth. The surplus water of the spring is employed to produce verdure there, and it is apparently equal to the task, for the forty or more acres so irrigated produce wonderful crops; hence it is "Greenland." Even twenty years ago the trip to Death Valley was a trying one to the experienced desert traveller in summer; to the tenderfoot without a guide it was almost certain death. The best equipment for the trip was a pair of mules, or else cayuse ponies, and a light buckboard with broad tires--tires so wide that they would not sink in the loose, wind-blown rock waste. The equipment might possibly be found in Daggett; more likely it must be purchased in San Bernardino.