GREEN RIVER BASIN. 193 



lively shallow bottoms through the soft, readily-disintegrated beds "vvhicli 

 cover the present surface, have followed in general the slope of the original 

 basin, while Green liiver, into which they all flow, shows in the southern 

 portion of the region an utter disregard of the present topography. This 

 stream, whose name may have been suggested to the early explorers by the 

 somewhat greenish tinge of its wat3rs, or by the Brilliant contrast, v/hicli 

 the narrow fringe of grass and cottonwood trees along its banks makes 

 with the glaring white and red colors of the desert plains, takes its rise 

 in the Wind River Mountains, and flows in a southerly direction through 

 the middle of the basin, at first in a Avide, alluvial bottom, but south of the 

 line of the railroad in a narrow canon-like bed, cut a thousand feet or more 

 through the horizontal Tertiary strata. Traversing the open valley of 

 Henry's Fork, it enters the Uinta Eange at Flaming Gorge, following, 

 in canons cut thousands of fee't into the hardest quartzite, an even more 

 sinuous course than that which it had in the soft Tertiary plains. 



A striking illustration of the irregularity of this course is shown, immedi- 

 ately after its entrance into the mountains, when leaving the natural valley at 

 the base of the line of cliffs, stretching westward from Flaming Gorge, it 

 bends abruptly to the southwest, cutting a deep canon through hard rock 

 for a distance of over 2 miles, and, curving with a horseshoe bend, returns 

 to the clayey valley at the base of the cliffs within a mile of the point where 

 it left it. In the view in Plate I, looking southward from the edge of the 

 cliff's near Flaming Gorge, these two sharp bends of the river are seen, and . 

 the low divide, scarcely 200 feet above its bed, which separates them. 



At first its direction is at right angles to the trend of the range; tlien 

 bending eastward, parallel to its geological axis, it emerges into the open 

 Tertiary valley of Brown's Park, in which, however, it shows the same disre- 

 gard of the present topography as before, occasionally leaving the soft beds 

 of the valley to cut a gorge through some projecting spur of hard quartzite rock. 

 After pursuing an easterly course for a distance of about 40 miles, it bends 

 again to the southward, leaving what would seem to be its most natural 

 course through the low valleys, which extend around the eastern end of the 

 Uinta Range, and cutting a narrow, winding gorge over 3,000 feet deep 



13 D G 



