Title: The Grand Cañon of the Colorado
Author: Muir, John
Language: English
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THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO

by John Muir

1902



Happy nowadays is the tourist, with earth’s wonders, new and old,
spread invitingly open before him, and a host of able workers as his
slaves making everything easy, padding plush about him, grading roads
for him, boring tunnels, moving hills out of his way, eager, like the
devil, to show him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and
foolishness, spiritualizing travel for him with lightning and steam,
abolishing space and time and almost everything else. Little children
and tender, pulpy people, as well as storm-seasoned explorers, may now
go almost everywhere in smooth comfort, cross oceans and deserts scarce
accessible to fishes and birds, and, dragged by steel horses, go up
high mountains, riding gloriously beneath starry showers of sparks,
ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind and chariot of fire.

First of the wonders of the great West to be brought within reach of
the tourist were the Yosemite and the Big Trees, on the completion of
the first transcontinental railway; next came the Yellowstone and icy
Alaska, by the Northern roads; and last the Grand Cañon of the
Colorado, which, naturally the hardest to reach, has now become, by a
branch of the Santa Fé, the most accessible of all.

Of course with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our
wilderness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are
bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as if
stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads, are
frightened from the groves. Too often the groves also vanish, leaving
nothing but ashes. Fortunately, nature has a few big places beyond
man’s power to spoil—the ocean, the two icy ends of the globe, and the
Grand Cañon.

When I first heard of the Santa Fé trains running to the edge of the
Grand Cañon of Arizona, I was troubled with thoughts of the
disenchantment likely to follow. But last winter, when I saw those
trains crawling along through the pines of the Cocanini Forest and
close up to the brink of the chasm at Bright Angel, I was glad to
discover that in the presence of such stupendous scenery they are
nothing. The locomotives and trains are mere beetles and caterpillars,
and the noise they make is as little disturbing as the hooting of an
owl in the lonely woods.

In a dry, hot, monotonous forested plateau, seemingly boundless, you
come suddenly and without warning upon the abrupt edge of a gigantic
sunken landscape of the wildest, most multitudinous features, and those
features, sharp and angular, are made out of flat beds of limestone and
sandstone forming a spiry, jagged, gloriously colored mountain-range
countersunk in a level gray plain. It is a hard job to sketch it even
in scrawniest outline; and try as I may, not in the least sparing
myself, I cannot tell the hundredth part of the wonders of its
features—the side-cañons, gorges, alcoves, cloisters, and amphitheaters
of vast sweep and depth, carved in its magnificent walls; the throng of
great architectural rocks it contains resembling castles, cathedrals,
temples, and palaces, towered and spired and painted, some of them
nearly a mile high, yet beneath one’s feet. All this, however, is less
difficult than to give any idea of the impression of wild, primeval
beauty and power one receives in merely gazing from its brink. The view
down the gulf of color and over the rim of its wonderful wall, more
than any other view I know, leads us to think of our earth as a star
with stars swimming in light, every radiant spire pointing the way to
the heavens.

But it is impossible to conceive what the cañon is, or what impression
it makes, from descriptions or pictures, however good. Naturally it is
untellable even to those who have seen something perhaps a little like
it on a small scale in this same plateau region. One’s most extravagant
expectations are indefinitely surpassed, though one expect much from
what is said of it as “the biggest chasm on earth”—“so big is it that
all other big things,—Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Pyramids,
Chicago,—all would be lost if tumbled into it.” Naturally enough,
illustrations as to size are sought for among other cañons like or
unlike it, with the common result of worse confounding confusion. The
prudent keep silence. It was once said that the “Grand Cañon could put
a dozen Yosemites in its vest pocket.”

The justly famous Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone is, like the Colorado,
gorgeously colored and abruptly countersunk in a plateau, and both are
mainly the work of water. But the Colorado’s cañon is more than a
thousand times larger, and as a score or two new buildings of ordinary
size would not appreciably change the general view of a great city, so
hundreds of Yellowstones might be eroded in the sides of the Colorado
Cañon without noticeably augmenting its size or the richness of its
sculpture. But it is not true that the great Yosemite rocks would be
thus lost or hidden. Nothing of their kind in the world, so far as I
know, rivals El Capitan and Tissiack, much less dwarfs or in any way
belittles them. None of the sandstone or limestone precipices of the
cañon that I have seen or heard of approaches in smooth, flawless
strength and grandeur the granite face of El Capitan or the Tenaya side
of Cloud’s Rest. These colossal cliffs, types of permanence, are about
three thousand and six thousand feet high; those of the cañon that are
sheer are about half as high, and are types of fleeting change; while
glorious-domed Tissiack, noblest of mountain buildings, far from being
overshadowed or lost in this rosy, spiry cañon company, would draw
every eye, and, in serene majesty, “aboon them a’” she would take her
place—castle, temple, palace, or tower. Nevertheless a noted writer,
comparing the Grand Cañon in a general way with the glacial Yosemite,
says: “And the Yosemite—ah, the lovely Yosemite! Dumped down into the
wilderness of gorges and mountains, it would take a guide who knew of
its existence a long time to find it.” This is striking, and shows up
well above the levels of commonplace description; but it is confusing,
and has the fatal fault of not being true. As well try to describe an
eagle by putting a lark in it. “And the lark—ah, the lovely lark!
Dumped down the red, royal gorge of the eagle, it would be hard to
find.” Each in its own place is better, singing at heaven’s gate, and
sailing the sky with the clouds.

Every feature of nature’s big face is beautiful,—height and hollow,
wrinkle, furrow, and line,—and this is the main master furrow of its
kind on our continent, incomparably greater and more impressive than
any other yet discovered, or likely to be discovered, now that all the
great rivers have been traced to their heads.

The Colorado River rises in the heart of the continent on the dividing
ranges and ridges between the two oceans, drains thousands of snowy
mountains through narrow or spacious valleys, and thence through cañons
of every color, sheer-walled and deep, all of which seem to be
represented in this one grand cañon of cañons.

It is very hard to give anything like an adequate conception of its
size, much more of its color, its vast wall-sculpture, the wealth of
ornate architectural buildings that fill it, or, most of all, the
tremendous impression it makes. According to Major Powell, it is about
two hundred and seventeen miles long, from five to fifteen miles wide
from rim to rim, and from about five thousand to six thousand feet
deep. So tremendous a chasm would be one of the world’s greatest
wonders even if, like ordinary cañons cut in sedimentary rocks, it were
empty and its walls were simple. But instead of being plain, the walls
are so deeply and elaborately carved into all sorts of
recesses—alcoves, cirques, amphitheaters, and side-cañons—that were you
to trace the rim closely around on both sides your journey would be
nearly a thousand miles long. Into all these recesses the level,
continuous beds of rock in ledges and benches, with their various
colors, run like broad ribbons, marvelously beautiful and effective
even at a distance of ten or twelve miles. And the vast space these
glorious walls inclose, instead of being empty, is crowded with
gigantic architectural rock forms gorgeously colored and adorned with
towers and spires like works of art.

Looking down from this level plateau, we are more impressed with a
feeling of being on the top of everything than when looking from the
summit of a mountain. From side to side of the vast gulf, temples,
palaces, towers, and spires come soaring up in thick array half a mile
or nearly a mile above their sunken, hidden bases, some to a level with
our standpoint, but none higher. And in the inspiring morning light all
are so fresh and rosy-looking that they seem new-born; as if, like the
quick-growing crimson snow-plants of the California woods, they had
just sprung up, hatched by the warm, brooding, motherly weather.

In trying to describe the great pines and sequoias of the Sierra, I
have often thought that if one of those trees could be set by itself in
some city park, its grandeur might there be impressively realized;
while in its home forests, where all magnitudes are great, the weary,
satiated traveler sees none of them truly. It is so with these majestic
rock structures.

Though mere residual masses of the plateau, they are dowered with the
grandeur and repose of mountains, together with the finely chiseled
carving and modeling of man’s temples and palaces, and often, to a
considerable extent, with their symmetry. Some, closely observed, look
like ruins; but even these stand plumb and true, and show architectural
forms loaded with lines strictly regular and decorative, and all are
arrayed in colors that storms and time seem only to brighten. They are
not placed in regular rows in line with the river, but “a’ through
ither,” as the Scotch say, in lavish, exuberant crowds, as if nature in
wildest extravagance held her bravest structures as common as
gravel-piles. Yonder stands a spiry cathedral nearly five thousand feet
in height, nobly symmetrical, with sheer buttressed walls and arched
doors and windows, as richly finished and decorated with sculptures as
the great rock temples of India or Egypt. Beside it rises a huge castle
with arched gateway, turrets, watch-towers, ramparts, etc., and to
right and left palaces, obelisks, and pyramids fairly fill the gulf,
all colossal and all lavishly painted and carved. Here and there a
flat-topped structure may be seen, or one imperfectly domed; but the
prevailing style is ornate Gothic, with many hints of Egyptian and
Indian.

Throughout this vast extent of wild architecture—nature’s own capital
city—there seem to be no ordinary dwellings. All look like grand and
important public structures, except perhaps some of the lower pyramids,
broad-based and sharp-pointed, covered with down-flowing talus like
loosely set tents with hollow, sagging sides. The roofs often have
disintegrated rocks heaped and draggled over them, but in the main the
masonry is firm and laid in regular courses, as if done by square and
rule.

Nevertheless they are ever changing: their tops are now a dome, now a
flat table or a spire, as harder or softer strata are reached in their
slow degradation, while the sides, with all their fine moldings, are
being steadily undermined and eaten away. But no essential change in
style or color is thus effected. From century to century they stand the
same. What seems confusion among the rough earthquake-shaken crags
nearest one comes to order as soon as the main plan of the various
structures appears. Every building, however complicated and laden with
ornamental lines, is at one with itself and every one of its neighbors,
for the same characteristic controlling belts of color and solid strata
extend with wonderful constancy for very great distances, and pass
through and give style to thousands of separate structures, however
their smaller characters may vary.

Of all the various kinds of ornamental work displayed,—carving, tracery
on cliff-faces, moldings, arches, pinnacles,—none is more admirably
effective or charms more than the webs of rain-channeled taluses.
Marvelously extensive, without the slightest appearance of waste or
excess, they cover roofs and dome-tops and the base of every cliff,
belt each spire and pyramid and massy, towering temple, and in
beautiful continuous lines go sweeping along the great walls in and out
around all the intricate system of side-cañons, amphitheaters, cirques,
and scallops into which they are sculptured. From one point hundreds of
miles of this fairy embroidery may be traced. It is all so fine and
orderly that it would seem that not only had the clouds and streams
been kept harmoniously busy in the making of it, but that every
raindrop sent like a bullet to a mark had been the subject of a
separate thought, so sure is the outcome of beauty through the stormy
centuries. Surely nowhere else are there illustrations so striking of
the natural beauty of desolation and death, so many of nature’s own
mountain buildings wasting in glory of high desert air—going to dust.
See how steadfast in beauty they all are in their going. Look again and
again how the rough, dusty boulders and sand of disintegration from the
upper ledges wreathe in beauty the next and next below with these
wonderful taluses, and how the colors are finer the faster the waste.
We oftentimes see nature giving beauty for ashes,—as in the flowers of
a prairie after fire,—but here the very dust and ashes are beautiful.

Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its
great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most
impresses us. It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous
walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms
instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once unbroken
plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge beds of
rocks. Other valleys of erosion are as great,—in all their dimensions
some are greater,—but none of these produces an effect on the
imagination at once so quick and profound, coming without study, given
at a glance. Therefore by far the greatest and most influential feature
of this view from Bright Angel or any other of the cañon views is the
opposite wall. Of the one beneath our feet we see only fragmentary
sections in cirques and amphitheaters and on the sides of the
outjutting promontories between them, while the other, though far
distant, is beheld in all its glory of color and noble proportions—the
one supreme beauty and wonder to which the eye is ever turning. For
while charming with its beauty it tells the story of the stupendous
erosion of the cañon—the foundation of the unspeakable impression made
on everybody. It seems a gigantic statement for even nature to make,
all in one mighty stone word, apprehended at once like a burst of
light, celestial color its natural vesture, coming in glory to mind and
heart as to a home prepared for it from the very beginning. Wildness so
godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth’s beauty and
size. Not even from high mountains does the world seem so wide, so like
a star in glory of light on its way through the heavens.

I have observed scenery-hunters of all sorts getting first views of
yosemites, glaciers. While Mountain ranges, etc. Mixed with the
enthusiasm which such scenery naturally excites, there is often weak
gushing, and many splutter aloud like little waterfalls. Here, for a
few moments at least, there is silence, and all are in dead earnest, as
if awed and hushed by an earthquake—perhaps until the cook cries
“Breakfast!” or the stable-boy “Horses are ready!” Then the poor
unfortunates, slaves of regular habits, turn quickly away, gasping and
muttering as if wondering where they had been and what had enchanted
them.

Roads have been made from Bright Angel Hotel through the Cocanini
Forest to the ends of outstanding promontories, commanding extensive
views up and down the cañon. The nearest of them, three or four miles
east and west, are McNeil’s Point and Rowe’s Point; the latter, besides
commanding the eternally interesting cañon, gives wide-sweeping views
southeast and west over the dark forest roof to the San Francisco and
Mount Trumbull volcanoes—the bluest of mountains over the blackest of
level woods.

Instead of thus riding in dust with the crowd, more will be gained by
going quietly afoot along the rim at different times of day and night,
free to observe the vegetation, the fossils in the rocks, the seams
beneath overhanging ledges once inhabited by Indians, and to watch the
stupendous scenery in the changing lights and shadows, clouds, showers,
and storms. One need not go hunting the so-called “points of interest.”
The verge anywhere, everywhere, is a point of interest beyond one’s
wildest dreams.

As yet, few of the promontories or throng of mountain buildings in the
cañon are named. Nor among such exuberance of forms are names thought
of by the bewildered, hurried tourist. He would be as likely to think
of names for waves in a storm. The Eastern and Western Cloisters, Hindu
Amphitheater, Cape Royal, Powell’s Plateau, and Grand View Point, Point
Sublime, Bissell and Moran points, the Temple of Set, Vishnu’s Temple,
Shiva’s Temple, Twin Temples, Tower of Babel, Hance’s Column—these
fairly good names given by Dutton, Holmes, Moran, and others are
scattered over a large stretch of the cañon wilderness.

All the cañon rock-beds are lavishly painted, except a few neutral bars
and the granite notch at the bottom occupied by the river, which makes
but little sign. It is a vast wilderness of rocks in a sea of light,
colored and glowing like oak and maple woods in autumn, when the
sun-gold is richest. I have just said that it is impossible to learn
what the cañon is like from descriptions and pictures. Powell’s and
Dutton’s descriptions present magnificent views not only of the cañon
but of all the grand region round about it; and Holmes’s drawings,
accompanying Dutton’s report, are wonderfully good. Surely faithful and
loving skill can go no further in putting the multitudinous decorated
forms on paper. But the _colors_, the living, rejoicing _colors_,
chanting morning and evening in chorus to heaven! Whose brush or
pencil, however lovingly inspired, can give us these? And if paint is
of no effect, what hope lies in pen-work? Only this: some may be
incited by it to go and see for themselves.

No other range of mountainous rock-work of anything like the same
extent have I seen that is so strangely, boldly, lavishly colored. The
famous Yellowstone Cañon below the falls comes to mind, but, wonderful
as it is, and well deserved as is its fame, compared with this it is
only a bright rainbow ribbon at the roots of the pines. Each of the
series of level, continuous beds of carboniferous rocks of the cañon
has, as we have seen, its own characteristic color. The summit
limestone-beds are pale yellow; next below these are the beautiful
rose-colored cross-bedded sandstones; next there are a thousand feet of
brilliant red sandstones; and below these the red wall limestones, over
two thousand feet thick, rich massy red, the greatest and most
influential of the series, and forming the main color-fountain. Between
these are many neutral-tinted beds. The prevailing colors are
wonderfully deep and clear, changing and blending with varying
intensity from hour to hour, day to day, season to season; throbbing,
wavering, glowing, responding to every passing cloud or storm, a world
of color in itself, now burning in separate rainbow bars streaked and
blotched with shade, now glowing in one smooth, all-pervading ethereal
radiance like the alpenglow, uniting the rocky world with the heavens.

The dawn, as in all the pure, dry desert country, is ineffably
beautiful; and when the first level sunbeams sting the domes and
spires, with what a burst of power the big, wild days begin! The dead
and the living, rocks and hearts alike, awake and sing the new-old song
of creation. All the massy headlands and salient angles of the walls,
and the multitudinous temples and palaces, seem to catch the light at
once, and cast thick black shadows athwart hollow and gorge, bringing
out details as well as the main massive features of the architecture;
while all the rocks, as if wild with life, throb and quiver and glow in
the glorious sunburst, rejoicing. Every rock temple then becomes a
temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an angel of light and song,
shouting color halleluiahs.

As the day draws to a close, shadows, wondrous, black, and thick, like
those of the morning, fill up the wall hollows, while the glowing
rocks, their rough angles burned off, seem soft and hot to the heart as
they stand submerged in purple haze, which now fills the cañon like a
sea. Still deeper, richer, more divine grow the great walls and
temples, until in the supreme flaming glory of sunset the whole cañon
is transfigured, as if all the life and light of centuries of sunshine
stored up and condensed in the rocks was now being poured forth as from
one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and sky.

Strange to say, in the full white effulgence of the midday hours the
bright colors grow dim and terrestrial in common gray haze; and the
rocks, after the manner of mountains, seem to crouch and drowse and
shrink to less than half their real stature, and have nothing to say to
one, as if not at home. But it is fine to see how quickly they come to
life and grow radiant and communicative as soon as a band of white
clouds come floating by. As if shouting for joy, they seem to spring up
to meet them in hearty salutation, eager to touch them and beg their
blessings. It is just in the midst of these dull midday hours that the
cañon clouds are born.

A good storm-cloud full of lightning and rain on its way to its work on
a sunny desert day is a glorious object. Across the cañon, opposite the
hotel, is a little tributary of the Colorado called Bright Angel Creek.
A fountain-cloud still better deserves the name “Angel of the Desert
Wells”—clad in bright plumage, carrying cool shade and living water to
countless animals and plants ready to perish, noble in form and
gesture, seeming able for anything, pouring life-giving, wonder-working
floods from its alabaster fountains, as if some sky-lake had broken. To
every gulch and gorge on its favorite ground is given a passionate
torrent, roaring, replying to the rejoicing lightning—stones, tons in
weight, hurrying away as if frightened, showing something of the way
Grand Cañon work is done. Most of the fertile summer clouds of the
cañon are of this sort, massive, swelling cumuli, growing rapidly,
displaying delicious tones of purple and gray in the hollows of their
sun-beaten bosses, showering favored areas of the heated landscape, and
vanishing in an hour or two. Some, busy and thoughtful-looking, glide
with beautiful motion along the middle of the cañon in flocks, turning
aside here and there, lingering as if studying the needs of particular
spots, exploring side-cañons, peering into hollows like birds seeking
nest-places, or hovering aloft on outspread wings. They scan all the
red wilderness, dispensing their blessings of cool shadows and rain
where the need is the greatest, refreshing the rocks, their offspring
as well as the vegetation, continuing their sculpture, deepening gorges
and sharpening peaks. Sometimes, blending all together, they weave a
ceiling from rim to rim, perhaps opening a window here and there for
sunshine to stream through, suddenly lighting some palace or temple and
making it flare in the rain as if on fire.

Sometimes, as one sits gazing from a high, jutting promontory, the sky
all clear, showing not the slightest wisp or penciling, a bright band
of cumuli will appear suddenly, coming up the cañon in single file, as
if tracing a well-known trail, passing in review, each in turn darting
its lances and dropping its shower, making a row of little vertical
rivers in the air above the big brown one. Others seem to grow from
mere points, and fly high above the cañon, yet following its course for
a long time, noiseless, as if hunting, then suddenly darting lightning
at unseen marks, and hurrying on. Or they loiter here and there as if
idle, like laborers out of work, waiting to be hired.

Half a dozen or more showers may oftentimes be seen falling at once,
while far the greater part of the sky is in sunshine, and not a
raindrop comes nigh one. These thunder-showers from as many separate
clouds, looking like wisps of long hair, may vary greatly in effects.
The pale, faint streaks are showers that fail to reach the ground,
being evaporated on the way down through the dry, thirsty air, like
streams in deserts. Many, on the other hand, which in the distance seem
insignificant, are really heavy rain, however local; these are the gray
wisps well zigzagged with lightning. The darker ones are torrent rain,
which on broad, steep slopes of favorable conformation give rise to
so-called “cloudbursts”; and wonderful is the commotion they cause. The
gorges and gulches below them, usually dry, break out in loud uproar,
with a sudden downrush of muddy, boulder-laden floods. Down they all go
in one simultaneous gush, roaring like lions rudely awakened, each of
the tawny brood actually kicking up a dust at the first onset.

During the winter months snow falls over all the high plateau, usually
to a considerable depth, whitening the rim and the roofs of the cañon
buildings. But last winter, when I arrived at Bright Angel in the
middle of January, there was no snow in sight, and the ground was dry,
greatly to my disappointment, for I had made the trip mainly to see the
cañon in its winter garb. Soothingly I was informed that this was an
exceptional season, and that the good snow might arrive at any time.
After waiting a few days, I gladly hailed a broad-browed cloud coming
grandly on from the west in big promising blackness, very unlike the
white sailors of the summer skies. Under the lee of a rim-ledge, with
another snow-lover, I watched its movements as it took possession of
the cañon and all the adjacent region in sight. Trailing its gray
fringes over the spiry tops of the great temples and towers, it
gradually settled lower, embracing them all with ineffable kindness and
gentleness of touch, and fondled the little cedars and pines as they
quivered eagerly in the wind like young birds begging their mothers to
feed them. The first flakes and crystals began to fly about noon,
sweeping straight up the middle of the cañon, and swirling in
magnificent eddies along the sides. Gradually the hearty swarms closed
their ranks, and all the cañon was lost in gray gloom except a short
section of the wall and a few trees beside us, which looked glad with
snow in their needles and about their feet as they leaned out over the
gulf. Suddenly the storm opened with magical effect to the north over
the cañon of Bright Angel Creek, inclosing a sunlit mass of the cañon
architecture, spanned by great white concentric arches of cloud like
the bows of a silvery aurora. Above these and a little back of them was
a series of upboiling purple clouds, and high above all, in the
background, a range of noble cumuli towered aloft like snow-laden
mountains, their pure pearl bosses flooded with sunshine. The whole
noble picture, calmly glowing, was framed in thick gray gloom, which
soon closed over it; and the storm went on, opening and closing until
night covered all.

Two days later, when we were on a jutting point about eighteen miles
east of Bright Angel and one thousand feet higher, we enjoyed another
storm of equal glory as to cloud effects, though only a few inches of
snow fell. Before the storm began we had a magnificent view of this
grander upper part of the cañon and also of the Cocanini Forest and
Painted Desert. The march of the clouds with their storm-banners flying
over this sublime landscape was unspeakably glorious, and so also was
the breaking up of the storm next morning—the mingling of silver-capped
rock, sunshine, and cloud.

Most tourists make out to be in a hurry even here; therefore their few
days or hours would be best spent on the promontories nearest the
hotel. Yet a surprising number go down the Bright Angel trail to the
brink of the inner gloomy granite gorge overlooking the river. Deep
cañons attract like high mountains; the deeper they are, the more
surely are we drawn into them. On foot, of course, there is no danger
whatever, and, with ordinary precautions, but little on animals. In
comfortable tourist faith, unthinking, unfearing, down go men, women,
and children on whatever is offered, horse, mule, or burro, as if
saying with Jean Paul, “fear nothing but fear”—not without reason, for
these cañon trails down the stairways of the gods are less dangerous
than they seem, less dangerous than home stairs. The guides are
cautious, and so are the experienced, much-enduring beasts. The
scrawniest Rosinantes and wizened-rat mules cling hard to the rocks
endwise or sidewise, like lizards or ants. From terrace to terrace,
climate to climate, down one creeps in sun and shade, through gorge and
gully and grassy ravine, and, after a long scramble on foot, at last
beneath the mighty cliffs one comes to the grand, roaring river.

To the mountaineer the depth of the cañon, from five thousand to six
thousand feet, will not seem so very wonderful, for he has often
explored others that are about as deep. But the most experienced will
be awe-struck but the vast extent of strange, countersunk scenery, the
multitude of huge rock monuments of painted masonry built up in regular
courses towering above, beneath, and round about him. By the Bright
Angel trail the last fifteen hundred feet of the descent to the river
has to be made afoot down the gorge of Indian Garden Creek. Most of the
visitors do not like this part, and are content to stop at the end of
the horse-trail and look down on the dull-brown flood from the edge of
the Indian Garden Plateau. By the new Hance trail, excepting a few
daringly steep spots, you can ride all the way to the river, where
there is a good spacious camp-ground in a mesquit-grove. This trail,
built by brave Hance, begins on the highest part of the rim, eight
thousand feet above the sea, a thousand feet higher than the head of
Bright Angel trail, and the descent is a little over six thousand feet,
through a wonderful variety of climate and life. Often late in the
fall, when frosty winds are blowing and snow is flying at one end of
the trail, tender plants are blooming in balmy summer weather at the
other. The trip down and up can be made afoot easily in a day. In this
way one is free to observe the scenery and vegetation, instead of
merely clinging to his animal and watching its steps. But all who have
time should go prepared to camp awhile on the riverbank, to rest and
learn something about the plants and animals and the mighty flood
roaring past. In cool, shady amphitheaters at the head of the trail
there are groves of white silver fir and Douglas spruce, with ferns and
saxifrages that recall snowy mountains; below these, yellow pine,
nut-pine, juniper, hop-hornbeam, ash, maple, holly-leaved berberis,
cowania, spiraea, dwarf oak, and other small shrubs and trees. In dry
gulches and on taluses and sun-beaten crags are sparsely scattered
yuccas, cactuses, agave, etc. Where springs gush from the rocks there
are willow thickets, grassy flats, and bright flowery gardens, and in
the hottest recesses the delicate abronia, mesquit, woody compositae,
and arborescent cactuses.

The most striking and characteristic part of this widely varied
vegetation are the cactaceae—strange, leafless, old-fashioned plants
with beautiful flowers and fruit, in every way able and admirable.
While grimly defending themselves with innumerable barbed spears, they
offer both food and drink to man and beast. Their juicy globes and
disks and fluted cylindrical columns are almost the only desert wells
that never go dry, and they always seem to rejoice the more and grow
plumper and juicier the hotter the sunshine and sand. Some are
spherical, like rolled-up porcupines, crouching in rock hollows beneath
a mist of gray lances, unmoved by the wildest winds. Others, standing
as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars crowned with
magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look boldly abroad
over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests ever seen or
dreamed of. _Cereus giganteus_, the grim chief of the desert tribe, is
often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona. Several species of
tree yuccas in the same deserts, laden in early spring with superb
while lilies, form forests hardly less wonderful, though here they grow
singly or in small lonely groves. The low, almost stemless _Yucca
baccata_, with beautiful lily-flowers and sweet banana-like fruit,
prized by the Indians, is common along the cañon rim, growing on lean,
rocky soil beneath mountain-mahogany, nut-pines, and junipers, beside
dense flowery mats of _Spiraea caespitosa_ and the beautiful
pinnate-leaved _Spiraea millefolium_. The nut-pine, _Pinus edulis_,
scattered along the upper slopes and roofs of the cañon buildings, is
the principal tree of the strange Dwarf Cocanini Forest. It is a
picturesque stub of a pine about twenty-five feet high, usually-with
dead, lichened limbs thrust through its rounded head, and grows on
crags and fissured rock tables, braving heat and frost, snow and
drought, and continues patiently, faithfully fruitful for centuries.
Indians and insects and almost every desert bird and beast come to it
to be fed.

To civilized people from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the
cañon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse,
utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of a multitude
of our fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago
it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw
America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones,
some of them several stories high, with hundreds of rooms, on the mesas
of the adjacent regions. Their cliff-dwellings, almost numberless, are
still to be seen in the cañon, scattered along both sides from top to
bottom and throughout its entire length, built of stone and mortar in
seams and fissures like swallows’ nests, or on isolated ridges and
peaks. The ruins of larger buildings are found on open spots by the
river, but most of them aloft on the brink of the wildest, giddiest
precipices, sites evidently chosen for safety from enemies, and
seemingly accessible only to the birds of the air. Many caves were also
used as dwelling-places, as were mere seams on cliff-fronts formed by
unequal weathering and with or without outer or side walls; and some of
them were covered with colored pictures of animals. The most
interesting of these cliff-dwellings had pathetic little ribbon-like
strips of garden on narrow terraces, where irrigating-water could be
carried to them—most romantic of sky-gardens, but eloquent of hard
times.

In recesses along the river and on the first plateau flats above its
gorge were fields and gardens of considerable size, where
irrigating-ditches may still be traced. Some of these ancient gardens
are still cultivated by Indians, descendants of cliff dwellers, who
raise corn, squashes, melons, potatoes, etc., to reinforce the produce
of the many wild food-furnishing plants, nuts, beans, berries, yucca
and cactus fruits, grass and sunflower seeds, etc., and the flesh of
animals, deer, rabbits, lizards, etc. The cañon Indians I have met here
seem to be living much as did their ancestors, though not now driven
into rock dens. They are able, erect men, with commanding eyes, which
nothing that they wish to see can escape. They are never in a hurry,
have a strikingly measured, deliberate, bearish manner of moving the
limbs and turning the head, are capable of enduring weather, thirst,
hunger, and over-abundance, and are blessed with stomachs which triumph
over everything the wilderness may offer. Evidently their lives are not
bitter.

The largest of the cañon animals one is likely to see is the wild
sheep, or Rocky Mountain bighorn, a most admirable beast, with limbs
that never fail, at home on the most nerve-trying precipices,
acquainted with all the springs and passes and broken-down jumpable
places in the sheer ribbon cliffs, bounding from crag to crag in easy
grace and confidence of strength, his great horns held high above his
shoulders, wild red blood beating and hissing through every fiber of
him like the wind through a quivering mountain pine.

Deer also are occasionally met in the cañon, making their way to the
river when the wells of the plateau are dry. Along the short spring
streams beavers are still busy, as is shown by the cotton-wood and
willow timber they have cut and peeled, found in all the river
drift-heaps. In the most barren cliffs and gulches there dwell a
multitude of lesser animals, well-dressed, clear-eyed, happy little
beasts—wood-rats, kangaroo-rats, gophers, wood-mice, skunks, rabbits,
bob cats, and many others, gathering food, or dozing in their
sun-warmed dens. Lizards, too, of every kind and color are here
enjoying life on the hot cliffs, and making the brightest of them
brighter.

Nor is there any lack of feathered people. The golden eagle may be
seen, and the osprey, hawks, jays, humming-birds, 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 cañon 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 cañon on their adventurous
voyage of discovery thirty-three 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 them, the beauty of
them, 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, Wasatch,
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, Cotchetopa, 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 cañons, the beginning of the system
culminating in this grand cañon of cañons.

Our warm cañon 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 wide-spread 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 Cañon is only
one of its well-proportioned features, extends with a breadth of
hundreds of miles from the flanks of the Wasatch and Park Mountains to
the south of the San Francisco Peaks. Immediately to the north of the
deepest part of the cañon 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 Cañon 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 cañon grows wider and deeper. So also do
the side-cañons 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 that every particle of the sandstones
and limestones of these wonderful structures was 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 cañon, 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 Cañon is as nothing. Thus each wonder in sight
becomes a window through which other wonders come to view. In no other
part of this continent are the wonders of geology, the records of the
world’s auld lang syne, more widely opened, or displayed in higher
piles. The whole cañon is a mine of fossils, in which five thousand
feet of horizontal strata are exposed in regular succession over more
than a thousand square miles of wall-space, and on the adjacent plateau
region there is another series of beds twice as thick, forming a grand
geological library—a collection of stone books covering thousands of
miles of shelving tier on tier conveniently arranged for the student.
And with what wonderful scriptures are their pages filled—myriad forms
of successive floras and faunas, lavishly illustrated with colored
drawings, carrying us back into the midst of the life of a past
infinitely remote. And as we go on and on, studying this old, old life
in the light of the life beating warmly about us, we enrich and
lengthen our own.





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