It Appears, Therefore, That, However Old The Main
Trunk Of The Colorado May Be, All Its Widespread Upper Branches And
The Landscapes They Flow Through Are New-Born, Scarce At All Changed
As Yet In Any Important Feature Since They First Came To Light At The
Close Of The Glacial Period.
The so-called Grand Colorado Plateau, of which the Grand Canyon is
only one of the well-proportioned features, extends with a breadth of
hundreds of miles from the flanks of the Wahsatch and Park Mountains
to the south of the San Francisco Peaks.
Immediately to the north of
the deepest part of the canyon it rises in a series of subordinate
plateaus, diversified with green meadows, marshes, bogs, ponds,
forests, and grovy park valleys, a favorite Indian hunting ground,
inhabited by elk, deer, beaver, etc. But far the greater part of the
plateau is good sound desert, rocky, sandy, or fluffy with loose ashes
and dust, dissected in some places into a labyrinth of stream-channel
chasms like cracks in a dry clay-bed, or the narrow slit crevasses of
glaciers - blackened with lava flows, dotted with volcanoes and
beautiful buttes, and lined with long continuous escarpments - a vast
bed of sediments of an ancient sea-bottom, still nearly as level as
when first laid down after being heaved into the sky a mile or two
high.
Walking quietly about in the alleys and byways of the Grand Canyon
city, we learn something of the way it was made; and all must admire
effects so great from means apparently so simple; rain striking light
hammer blows or heavier in streams, with many rest Sundays; soft air
and light, gentle sappers and miners, toiling forever; the big river
sawing the plateau asunder, carrying away the eroded and ground waste,
and exposing the edges of the strata to the weather; rain torrents
sawing cross-streets and alleys, exposing the strata in the same way
in hundreds of sections, the softer, less resisting beds weathering
and receding faster, thus undermining the harder beds, which fall, not
only in small weathered particles, but in heavy sheer-cleaving masses,
assisted down from time to time by kindly earthquakes, rain torrents
rushing the fallen material to the river, keeping the wall rocks
constantly exposed.
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