eneral aspect. The Rio Virgen, between Long Valley and the
Mormon town of Rockville, runs through Parunuweap Canyon, which is often
not more than 20 or 30 feet in width and is from 600 to 1,500 feet deep.
Away to the north the Yampa empties into the Green by a canyon that I
essayed to cross in the fall of 1868, but was baffled from day to day,
and the fourth day had nearly passed before I could find my way down to
the river. But thirty miles above its mouth this canyon ends, and a
narrow valley with a flood plain is found. Still farther up the stream
the river comes down through another canyon, and beyond that a narrow
valley is found, and its upper course is now through a canyon and now
through a valley. All these canyons are alike changeable in their
topographic characteristics.

The longest canyon through which the Colorado runs is that between the
mouth of the Colorado Chiquito and the Grand Wash, a distance of 217 1/2
miles. But this is separated from another above, 65 1/2 miles in length,
only by the narrow canyon valley of the Colorado Chiquito.

All the scenic features of this canyon land are on a giant scale,
strange and weird. The streams run at depths almost inaccessible,
lashing the rocks which beset their channels, rolling in rapids and
plunging in falls, and making a wild music which but adds to the gloom
of the solitude. The little valleys nestling along the streams are
diversified by bordering willows, clumps of box elder, and small groves
of cottonwood.

Low mesas, dry, treeless, stretch back from the brink of the canyon,
often showing smooth surfaces of naked, solid rock. In some places the
country rock is composed of marls, and here the surface is a bed of
loose, disintegrated material through which one walks as in a bed of
ashes. Often these marls are richly colored and variegated. In other
places the country rock is a loose sandstone, the disintegration of
which has left broad stretches of drifting sand, white, golden, and
vermilion. Where this sandstone is a conglomerate, a paving of pebbles
has been left,--a mosaic of many colors, polished by the drifting sands
and glistening in the sunlight.

After the canyons, the most remarkable features of the country are the
long lines of cliffs. These are bold escarpments scores or hundreds of
miles in length,--great geographic steps, often hundreds or thousands of
feet in altitude, presenting steep faces of rock, often vertical. Having
climbed one of th