The Golden Eagle May Be
Seen, And The Osprey, Hawks, Jays, Hummingbirds, The Mourning Dove,
And Cheery Familiar Singers - The Black-Headed Grosbeak, Robin,
Bluebird, Townsend's Thrush, And Many Warblers, Sailing The Sky And
Enlivening The Rocks And Bushes Through All The Canyon Wilderness.
Here at Hance's river camp or a few miles above it brave Powell and
his brave men passed their first night in the canyon on the
adventurous voyage of discovery thirty-three[34] years ago.
They
faced a thousand dangers, open or hidden, now in their boats gladly
sliding down swift, smooth reaches, now rolled over and over in back-combing surges of rough, roaring cataracts, sucked under in eddies,
swimming like beavers, tossed and beaten like castaway drift - stout-hearted, undaunted, doing their work through it all. After a month of
this they floated smoothly out of the dark, gloomy, roaring abyss into
light and safety two hundred miles below. As the flood rushes past
us, heavy-laden with desert mud, we naturally think of its sources,
its countless silvery branches outspread on thousands of snowy
mountains along the crest of the continent, and the life of the, the
beauty of the, their history and romance. Its topmost springs are far
north and east in Wyoming and Colorado, on the snowy Wind River,
Front, Park, and Sawatch Ranges, dividing the two ocean waters, and
the Elk, Wahsatch, Uinta, and innumerable spurs streaked with streams,
made famous by early explorers and hunters. It is a river of rivers - the Du Chesne, San Rafael, Yampa, Dolores, Gunnison, Cochetopa,
Uncompahgre, Eagle, and Roaring Rivers, the Green and the Grand, and
scores of others with branches innumerable, as mad and glad a band as
ever sang on mountains, descending in glory of foam and spray from
snow-banks and glaciers through their rocky moraine-dammed, beaver-dammed channels. Then, all emerging from dark balsam and pine woods
and coming together, they meander through wide, sunny park valleys,
and at length enter the great plateau and flow in deep canyons, the
beginning of the system culminating in this grand canyon of canyons.
Our warm canyon camp is also a good place to give a thought to the
glaciers which still exist at the heads of the highest tributaries.
Some of them are of considerable size, especially those on the Wind
River and Sawatch ranges in Wyoming and Colorado. They are remnants
of a vast system of glaciers which recently covered the upper part of
the Colorado basin, sculptured its peaks, ridges, and valleys to their
present forms, and extended far out over the plateau region - how far I
cannot now say. 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. Thus the canyon grows wider and deeper. So also
do the side canyons and amphitheaters, while secondary gorges and
cirques gradually isolate masses of the promontories, forming new
buildings, all of which are being weathered and pulled and shaken down
while being built, showing destruction and creation as one. We see
the proudest temples and palaces in stateliest attitudes, wearing
their sheets of detritus as royal robes, shedding off showers of red
and yellow stones like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to
dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of
angels the natural beauty of death.
Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of
sediments, - sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled
with the remains of animals, - and every particle of the sandstones and
limestones of these wonderful structures to be derived from other
landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams
of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes,
and other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the
canyon, we discover that an amount of material has been carried off in
the general denudation of the region compared with which even that
carried away in the making of the Grand Canyon is as nothing.
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