214 



GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 



At this point the river also changes its course, coming out of the 

 Book Cliffs in a course nearly due south. The valley continues nar- 

 row, with shale bluffs and a narrow strip of irrigated bottom land. 

 Just beyond milepost 625 a branch line on the east (right) leads to 

 Kenilworth, a mining town that produces a notable part of the coal 

 shipped from this region. About a mile farther north, in a valley 

 so narrow as scarcely to provide room for a single 

 Helper. street, is the railroad town of Helper, which was so 



Elevation 5,840 feet, named becausc here are kept the light engines that 



Population 1.606. i + • uu ^ 5> .-u i 



Denver 627 miles. serve the regular trains as helpers up the heavy 

 grade north of the town. The town is at the mouth 

 of the canyon that Price River has cut in the plateau of which the 

 Book Cliffs are the front. These cliffs loom up 1,500 feet above the 

 station and seem to interpose a blank wall against the further 

 progress of the railroad, but like many other things in this world 

 their appearance is deceptive, for the railroad has succeeded in fol- 

 lowing the stream through the narrow cleft. A view of the cliffs 

 from above is shown in Plate LXXXVI, C. 



The canyon above Helper shows at close range the character of the 

 coal-bearing (Mesaverde) formation. The lower part of the cliff 

 overlooking Helper is composed mainly of shale (Mancos), which 

 originated in the sea and therefore contains no coal. The rocks above 

 this shale are mainly sandstones, but there are also many beds of 

 shale, and in places there are coal beds, which range in thickness from 

 a few inches to as much as 20 feet. An old prospect in one of the thick 

 beds is shown in Plate LXXX, B (p. 195). The coal beds, however 

 thick they may be, can not generally be seen from the car windows, 

 for they are the softest members of the formation and consequently 

 weather back faster than either the shale or the sandstone, so that 

 their outcrop becomes covered with soil and broken rock. Sandstone 

 makes up the greater part of the formation, and its general color is 

 light gray or nearly white. It has been described as red, but this is a 

 mistake, as the formation contains no red sandstone, though a ledge 

 on weathering becomes a rusty brown, or if a coal bed below it has 

 been burned it may have become a bright red, but these are not the 

 inherent colors of the sandstone.'^" 



'"The follow'ing description of the 

 coal beds and the associated rocks in 

 the vicinity of Castlegate is given by 

 Frank R. Clark: 



At the mouth of Price River canyon 

 nearly vertical cliffs of sandstone 

 and shale rise 1,-500 feet above 

 ,the river bed. These cliffs are capped 

 by beds of sandstone that form the 



lower part of the Mesaverde forma- 

 tion. The beds that compose the cliffs 

 were laid down iu fresh water or on 

 the land. They rest upon soft dark 

 shale (Mancos), which was laid do\ATi 

 in a shallow sea that covered most of 

 the country. The line betvi^een these 

 formations is generally drawn at the 

 base of the heavy ledge-making sand- 



