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. Round about 
Coon Butte, then, within a radius of a score of miles, are 
hundreds of minor ash-cones and other manifestations 
of explosive vuleanism. 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.? 
All things considered it would be difficult to fancy an 
origin for the Coon Butte depression very different from 
the hundreds of voleanic 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 ;* 
*For a good photographic view, see Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. 17:720, 
. pl. 80. 1907. 
*Colorado River of the West, Ives’ Rept. 3:72. 1861. 
