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stone barriers were pierced by narrow gorges, prepared these secluded 

 and often beautiful spots in the midst of a rugged country for occupancy 

 and utilization by man. The origin of these park-expansions along 

 the courses of the streams trav^ersing the Tertiary plateau may be attrib- 

 utable to the erosion of the softer arenaceous deposits, which are known 

 to constitute horizons of considerable vertical extent in this formation. 



Crossing the high table-land to the north, which presents an open 

 growth of handsome pines and an extensive pasturage extending east- 

 ward in a distance of about three miles, we gain the northern edge of 

 the upland, where it suddenly breaks down into an extensive park-val- 

 ley, which stretches several miles to the northward, and which is here 

 and there occupied by shallow lakelets. To the left, the park is bounded 

 by a rather abrupt ridge, along the crest of which rises a narrow, much- 

 broken, dike-like escarpment, which is composed of the, highly-tilted 

 and metamorphosed Cretaceous sandstone, here nearly set on edge, the 

 dip being to the eastward. To the north, this great dike-wall trends 

 round to the northwestward, where it is lost to view behind the nearer 

 escarpments. The ridge must attain the height of near 500 feet 

 above the valley, of which perhaps 100 feet or more are made up of 

 the nearly vertical escarpment, from the foot of which a steep talus- 

 accumulation, covered by a sparse growth of pines and shrubs, and 

 strewn with great blocks of rock, descends into the valley. On the 

 east, a gradual ascent gains the summits of the bounding Tertiary hills, 

 which, however, to the north become more abrupt, stretching across the 

 farther end of the valley in broken, flat-topped hills, of which there are 

 several (at least four) distinct terrace-levels, all sloping gently east- 

 ward. Their slopes facing the valleys are sparsely wooded, and often 

 grassed over to the summit, but in the main they support quite a dense 

 evergreen growth. 



Beyond the Tertiary plateau, which crowds into the bay-like recess 

 around the trend of the hog-back ridge, the surface swells up into a high 

 undulating mountain-tract, from the summit of which, nearly twenty 

 miles away in a direction a little east of north, those peerless cones, the 

 Spanish Peaks, seem abruptly to spring. The isolation of these mount- 

 ain-masses, lying some fifteen miles to the east of the main range, with 

 which they are apparently connected by the elevated mountain-plateau, 

 has much to do with the grandeur of -their appearance, and which they 

 always present, viewed from whatever direction. As seen from the 

 plains in the vallej^ of the Purgatoire, sixty miles to the east, they are 

 blended in a single cone resembling, when clothed with snow, a pyram- 

 idal mass of cumulus resting upon the horizon. But approached from 

 that direction, their double summits become more and more distinct, 

 often flushed like a purple-tinted cloud; and, from the summit of the 

 Raton Pass, their duality becomes fully established, and as seen from 

 the highlands as far south at least as the Urac ridge, south of the 

 Cimarron. 



Eegaining the Upper Yermejo, whose diversified park-scenery has 

 lost nothing in interest by the brief sojourn on the other side of the Ka- 

 ton Hills, the trail leads across low hill-flats, through narrow shallow 

 valleys, beside willow-fringed rivulets and ponds, out upon the upland 

 rim of the basin, amidst open pastures dotted with pine, in whose branches 

 families of pretty gray squirrels are busied garnering the season's sup- 

 plies, and overhead troops of magpies take their vagaboudish flight. A 

 shallow depression leads by a gradual descent into the main valley, 

 which we regain at an open space five or six miles below our former 

 camp. Looking back wp the valley, isolated flat-topped outliers of Ter- 



