THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 49 



For the first twenty miles its course is in a level, 

 sunny valley lightly fringed with trees, through 

 which it flows in silvery reaches stirred into 

 spangles here and there by ducks and leaping 

 trout, making no sound save a low whispering 

 among the pebbles and the dipping willows and 

 sedges of its banks. Then suddenly, as if pre- 

 paring for hard work, it rushes eagerly, impetu- 

 ously forward rejoicing in its strength, breaks 

 into foam-bloom, and goes thundering down into 

 the Grand Canon in two magnificent falls, one 

 hundred and three hundred feet high. 



The canon is so tremendously wild and im- 

 pressive that even these great falls cannot hold 

 your attention. It is about twenty miles long 

 and a thousand feet deep, — a weird, unearthly- 

 looking gorge of jagged, fantastic architecture, 

 and most brilliantly colored. Here the Wash- 

 burn range, forming the northern rim of the 

 Yellowstone basin, made up mostly of beds of 

 rhyolite decomposed by the action of thermal 

 waters, has been cut through and laid open to 

 view by the river ; and a famous section it has 

 made. It is not the depth or the shape of the 

 canon, nor the waterfall, nor the green and gray 

 river chanting its brave song as it goes foaming 

 on its way, that most impresses the observer, but 

 the colors of the decomposed volcanic rocks. 

 With few exceptions, the traveler in strange 

 lands finds that, however much t|he scenery and 



