channel, and very swift. With great care and
constant watchfulness we proceed, making about four miles this
afternoon, and camp in a cave.

_August 14._ At daybreak we walk down the bank of the river, on a little
sandy beach, to take a view of a new feature in the canon. Heretofore
hard rocks have given us bad river; soft rocks, smooth water; and a
series of rocks harder than any we have experienced sets in. The river
enters the granite![1]

We can see but a little way into the granite gorge, but it looks
threatening.

After breakfast we enter on the waves. At the very introduction, it
inspires awe. The canon is narrower than we have ever before seen it;
the water is swifter; there are but few broken rocks in the channel; but
the walls are set, on either side, with pinnacles and crags; and sharp,
angular buttresses, bristling with wind and wave-polished spires, extend
far out into the river.

Ledges of rock jut into the stream, their tops just below the surface,
sometimes rising few or many feet above; and island ledges, and island
pinnacles, and island towers break the swift course of the stream into
chutes, and eddies, and whirlpools. We soon reach a place where a creek
comes in from the left, and just below the channel is choked with
boulders, which have washed down this lateral canon and formed a dam,
over which there is a fall of thirty or forty feet; but on the boulders
we can get foothold, and we make a portage.

Three more such dams are found. Over one we make a portage; at the other
two we find chutes, through which we can run.

As we proceed, the granite rises higher, until nearly a thousand feet of
the lower part of the walls are composed of this rock.

About eleven o'clock we hear a great roar ahead, and approach it very
cautiously. The sound grows louder and louder as we run, and at last we
find ourselves above a long, broken fall, with ledges and pinnacles of
rock obstructing the river. There is a descent of, perhaps, seventy-five
or eighty feet in a third of a mile, and the rushing waters break into
great waves on the rocks, and lash themselves into a mad, white, foam.
We can land just above, but there is no foothold on either side by which
we can make a portage. It is nearly a thousand feet to the top of the
granite, so it will be impossible to carry our boats around, though we
can climb to the summit up a side gulch, and, passing along a mile or
two, can descend to the river. This we find on ex