Keyes — Meteorites on the Painted Desert. 133 



crater walls are still 15,000 feet above sea-level. Around 

 their base, and for distances of miles from the central 

 mass, are numberless craterlets and ash-cones. To the 

 north and east of Coon Butte, for many miles extends 

 a broad, diversified stretch of country known as the 

 Painted Desert, the surface of which is abundantly 

 studded with lofty denuded necks of old volcanoes. A 

 few miles to the southward stretches away interminably 

 one of the great lava fields of the globe. Bound about 

 Coon Butte, then, within a radius of a score of miles, are 

 hundreds of minor ash-cones and other manifestations 

 of explosive vulcanism. Many of these rise 400 to 500 feet 

 above the level of the vast plain and often have craters 

 at their summits as perfectly preserved as on the day 

 when they were formed. Some of these ash-cones dis- 

 play at their bases the ragged, basset edges of the layered 

 rocks through which the volcanic powers found exit. 

 Other ash-cones, 200 to 300 feet in height, with perfect 

 craters in their tops, rise out of the floors of deep circu- 

 lar depressions entirely surrounded by steep rocky cliffs 

 the crest of which is the general plains-surface, and the 

 base of which is the level of the flat-bottomed rifts. 

 Crater Salt-Lake to the eastward of Canyon Diablo is 

 identical in every respect with Coon Butte, except that 

 from its floor project two small and perfect ash-cones. 2 

 All things considered it would be difficult to fancy an 

 origin for the Coon Butte depression very different from 

 the hundreds of volcanic disturbances of the explosive 

 type that are found everywhere throughout the vicinity. 

 Coon Butte cannot be considered by itself. It is not an 

 isolated, anomalous, incomparable feature of the land- 

 scape. It must be viewed in connection with its similar 

 geologic surroundings. 



Geologic Descriptions. The ash-cones about the San 

 Francisco mountains were early described by Newberry ; 3 



-For a good photographic view, see Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. 17:720, 

 pi. SO. 1907. 



3 Colorado River of the West, Ives' Rept. 3:72. 1861. 



