WATER POCKET FOLD— INCONSEQUENT DRAINAGE. 



287 



Everything visible tells of ruin and decay. It is the extreme of desola- 

 tion, the blankest solitude, a superlative desert. 



To the northeastward the radius of vision reaches out perhaps a hun- 

 dred miles, where everything gradually fades into dreamland, where the air 

 boils like a pot, and objects are just what our fancy chooses to make them. 

 Perhaps the most striking part of the picture is in the middle ground, where 

 the great Water Pocket fold turns up the truncated beds of the Trias and 

 Jura, whose edges face us from a great quadrant of which we occupy the 

 center. Where the strata are cut off in this way upon the slope of a 

 monocline they do not present to the front a common cliff and talus with 

 a straight crest-line, but a row of cusps like a battery of shark's teeth on a 

 large scale. But even in this relation the Jvirassic sandstone is peculiar, 

 for it is here of enormous thickness and so massive that it is virtually one 

 homogenous bed, and the great gashes cut across the fold or perpendicular 

 to the face of the outcrop have carved the stratum into colossal crags and 

 domes. By these tokens we can trace the Water Pocket fold from the 

 eastern slopes of Thousand Lake Mountain around a quadrant, whence its 

 course flies off in a tangent far into the south and is lost to view beyond 

 the Colorado. Its total length thus displayed must be about UO miles. 

 Across this monocline run the drainage channels which head in the amphi- 

 theaters along the eastern front of the Aquarius. It is interesting to note 

 how completely independent are these streams of the structural slopes of 

 the country. They rush into a cliff or into a rising slope of the strata as 

 if they were only banks of fog or smoke. It matters not which way the 

 strata dip, the streams have ways of their own. The Fremont River and 

 the creeks which flow down from Thousand Lake Mountain present a very 

 striking relation to the -strata. They at first run very obliquely into the 

 fold, and thence by an equally oblique course run out of it again. Nearer 

 to us Temple Creek plunges right into the flexure perpendicular to its strike 

 and in the somewhat uncommon relation of a stream running with the dip 

 of the strata. Still nearer, Tantalus Creek runs across the fold in the same 

 general relation but meanders about within it. 



In the first chapter I have explained this independence of drainage 

 channels of the structural slopes and attitudes of the strata by the general 



