ens grow as high as sixty or seventy feet and throw out at
intervals powerful branches which bend sharply upward; sometimes there
are as many as eight or nine of these gigantic branches.

No towering fir or spreading oak carries a more princely air. A forest
of giant saguaro rising from a painted desert far above the tangle of
creosote-bush, mesquite, cholla, bisnaga, and scores of other strange
growths of a land of strange attractions is a spectacle to stir the
blood and to remember for a lifetime.

COLORADO NATIONAL MONUMENT

On the desert border of far-western Colorado near Grand Junction is a
region of red sandstone which the erosion of the ages has carved into
innumerable strange and grotesque shapes. Once a great plain, then a
group of mesas, now it has become a city of grotesque monuments. Those
who have seen the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs can imagine
it multiplied many times in size, grotesqueness, complexity, and area;
such a vision will approximate the Colorado National Monument. The two
regions have other relations in common, for as the Garden of the Gods
flanks the Rockies' eastern slopes and looks eastward to the great
plains, so does the Colorado National Monument flank the Rockies'
western desert. Both are the disclosure by erosion of similar strata of
red sandstone which may have been more or less continuous before the
great Rockies wrinkled, lifted, and burst upward between them.

The rock monuments of this group are extremely highly colored. They rise
in several neighboring canyons and some of them are of great height and
fantastic design. One is a nearly circular column with a diameter of a
hundred feet at the base and a height of more than four hundred feet.

Caves add to the attractions, and there are many springs among the
tangled growths of the canyon floors. There are cedars and pinyon trees.
The region abounds in mule-deer and other wild animals.

CAPULIN MOUNTAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT

After the sea-bottom which is now our desert southwest rose for the last
time and became the lofty plateau of to-day, many were the changes by
which its surface became modified. Chief of these was the erosion which
has washed its levels thousands of feet below its potential altitude and
carved it so remarkably. But it also became a field of wide-spread
volcanic activity, and lavas and obsidians are constantly encountered
among its gravels, sands, and shales. Many also are the cones of dead
vo