THE GRAND CANON 



adventurous voyage of discovery thirty-three^ 

 years ago. They faced a thousand dangers, 

 open or hidden, now in their boats gladly 

 sliding down swift, smooth reaches, now rolled 

 over and over in back-combing surges of rough, 

 roaring cataracts, sucked under in eddies, 

 swimming like beavers, tossed and beaten like 

 castaway drift — stout-hearted, undaunted, do- 

 ing their work through it all. After a month 

 of this they floated smoothly out of the dark, 

 gloomy, roaring abyss into light and safety two 

 hundred miles below. As the flood rushes past 

 us, heavy-laden with desert mud, we natur- 

 ally think of its sources, its countless silvery 

 branches outspread on thousands of snowy 

 mountains along the crest of the continent, 

 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, Wahsatch, 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, Coche- 



* Muir wrote this description in 1902; Major J. W. Powell 

 made his descent through the canon, with small boats, in 

 1869. [Editor.l 



377 



