C2 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



Owing to the difficulty of traversing the region the plants 

 are imperfectly known. Wagon roads penetrate the interior 

 for short distances only, or end on its borders where some 

 trading post has been eseablished. The trails, which begin 

 where the roads leave off, are few, indistinct, usually rough, 

 and often precipitous. Horseback is the recognized method of 

 travel and goods of all kinds are transported on the backs of 

 pack animals. The region appears not to have attracted the 

 botanist ; in fact, large areas have never been visited by plant 

 collectors. This is certainly true of Navajo Mountain, a vast 

 pile of sandstone rising nearly two miles above sea-level near 

 the center of this area of cliff and canyon, and nearly 200 miles 

 from a railroad. 



It was my fortune to spend more than a month on and 

 about the mountain in the summer of 1919, during which time 

 I made a fairly complete collection of the plants in bloom. A 

 list of these with notes will be published later, the purpose of 

 the present article being simplv to record some general obser- 

 vations regarding the region. The trip was made possible 

 through the kindness of Dean Bvron Cummings, of the Uni- 

 versity of Arizona, who allowed us to join a party of his stu- 

 dents engaged in excavating various ruins on the Navajo Res- 

 ervation in an endeavor to solve certain problems connected 

 with the origin and migrations of the cliff dwellers and pueblo 

 Indians. 



We joined the University parlv at Flagstall, and after a 

 side trip of several da}-s to the Grand C\'iii\-on, \\e set out by 

 auto across the painted desert for Tuba City, a distance of 

 about a liundred miles. The road is a fairly good one, though 

 it crosses a region where there are neither villages or houses. 

 The landscajjc is quite unlike that to which the ordinary travel- 

 ler is accustomed. Here are great areas of bare soil, deep sand, 

 and lava-strewn fields, stretching away to far distant cliffs of 

 red, Ijuff, gray-green, and other colors that justify tlic name 



