DENVER & RIO GRANDE WESTERN ROUTE. 231 
and beyond it are the barren slopes of the Oquirrh Mountains 
(o’queer). Most of these desert ranges are not very high, but they 
are striking features, for they rise, island-like, out of a wide expanse 
of desert. 
The plain upon which the railroad is built is another of the nu- 
merous unnamed terraces that mark the shore line of Lake Bonne- 
ville and represent pauses of longer or shorter duration in the grad- 
ual lowering of the water in the basin. This is well 
developed about the station of Mapleton. The view 
from the railroad at this point is particularly fine 
because it embraces what appears to be the bottom 
of the valley, so wide is it and so completely culti- 
vated. On the right stands the great blank wall of the mountains, 
across whose front the Bonneville shore line (see Pl. LX X XIX, A) 
can be seen as a mere thread separating the slopes above—char- 
acterized by gashes cut by streams—from those below, in which all 
roughness and angularity have been concealed by the material de- 
posited in the ancient lake. Along the foot of the slope, within the 
irrigated lands, stretches a belt of sloping plain on which most of 
the homes of the region are built. Each house has its protecting row 
of slender poplar trees, which give the scene an aspect so foreign that 
one seeing it might almost imagine himself on the plains of northern 
Italy looking at the slopes of the Alps, instead of in the Salt Lake 
Valley looking at the slopes of the Wasatch Mountains. 
The abrupt change from the steep slope of the mountain front to 
the nearly flat surface of the desert plain, except where deltas and 
bars were built in the waters of old Lake Bonneville, is very striking 
and doubtless will attract the attention of many travelers. The 
traveler sees no foothills, no indication of a mountain front, until 
he reaches the foot of the slope. What does the abrupt change from 
mountain to plain mean, and has it any connection with the geologic 
history of the region? It assuredly has a meaning, and the processes 
that produced these mountains have had a most striking effect in 
determining not only the surface features of this region but its 
climate and its arid conditions. Long ago, as man measures time, 
the rocks composing the crust of the earth broke along a line that 
now coincides with the west front of the Wasatch Range, and the 
Mapleton. 
Elevation 4,724 feet. 
Population 586. 
enver 691 miles. 
“In quality of water and in temper- 
ature Lake Bonneville was as well 
fitted for abundant and varied life as 
the Bear Lake to-day, and though the 
only remains yet found in its sedi- 
ments are fresh-water shells, we need 
not doubt that its waters teemed with 
We may confidently picture its 
bordering marshes as fields of ver- 
dure and its bolder shores as forest 
clad; and we may less confidently 
imagine primitive man as a denizen of 
its shores and an eyewitness of the 
spectacular deluge when its earthen 
barrier was burst.” 
