ontinent, 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 canons, the beginning of the system culminating in this grand canon
of canons.

Our warm canon 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 Canon 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 canon 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 li