Visitors to almost any great scene are wont to compare it with some other scene; it reminds them of this place or that place. But when one first views Crater Lake, or while one is in the presence of the Big Trees for the first time, memory is suspended; and when one first beholds the Grand Cañon, it does not remind him of this or that--it completely possesses the observer, sweeps other scenes and places out of mind. Presently comes desire for a thousandfold capacity of feeling and comprehension. The thing is too vast and splendid for ordinary faculties. I have boated in many of the cañons of the Colorado and have camped and tramped along their rims. Often I have looked down into them when they were filled with mists; when broken clouds hung over them; when sunshine or moonlight illumined their depths, from which I have looked forth under like conditions. But to me, whether in summer or when snow piles the rim, the Grand Cañon never loses its intense impressiveness. [Illustration: LOOKING WEST FROM NORTH SIDE OF GRAND CAÑON Point Sublime to right in distance. Isis Temple on left. _By permission of the National Park Service, Department of the Interior_] The Walhalla Plateau is an extraordinary cañon view-point and is likely to become one of the most famous places on the earth. This narrow plateau thrusts ten miles out into the vast, deep, airy Grand Cañon. It extends from the north rim, between Bright Angel Cañon and the inside bend of the main cañon opposite the Cañon of the Little Colorado. A most commanding peninsula it is, with wide and enormous depths sweeping almost entirely around it. Other commanding view-points on the north rim are Point Sublime and Bright Angel Point. Three excellent view-points on the south rim are Grand View, Hopi Point, and the El Tovar. Grand View is a few miles up the river from the El Tovar Hotel, and opposite Cape Royal of the Walhalla Plateau. The Colorado River in Arizona flows through a series of twenty vast cañons that have a length of about one thousand miles. Most of them are end to end with only a mere break between. Of these, the Grand Cañon is the cañon of cañons. Counting downstream, it is the eighteenth of the series; counting upstream, the third. The cañon is from seven to fifteen miles wide, and from four thousand to six thousand feet deep. It is an enormous gulf two hundred miles long, in solid rock. Less than one thousand feet across at the bottom, and eight to ten miles across at the top, it may be called a rough V-shaped gorge; or, together with its tributary cañons, it might be called an inverted hollow mountain-range. This range, if turned out upon the plateau, would measure in places more than two hundred miles in length and nearly forty miles in width, with summits rising nearly seven thousand feet; and it would be diversified with ridges, gorges, plateaus, spurs, and peaks.