60 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



the volcanic forces been so busy. More than 

 ten thousand square miles hereabouts have been 

 covered to a depth of at least five thousand feet 

 with material spouted from chasms and craters 

 during the tertiary period, forming broad sheets 

 of basalt, andesite, rhyolite, etc., and marvelous 

 masses of ashes, sand, cinders, and stones now 

 consolidated into conglomerates, charged with the 

 remains of plants and animals that lived in the 

 calm, genial periods that separated the volcanic 

 outbursts. 



Perhaps the most interesting and telling of 

 these rocks, to the hasty tourist, are those that 

 make up the mass of Amethyst Mountain. On its 

 north side it presents a section two thousand feet 

 high of roughly stratified beds of sand, ashes, and 

 conglomerates coarse and fine, forming the un- 

 trimmed edges of a wonderful set of volumes ly- 

 ing on their sides, — books a million years old, 

 well bound, miles in size, with full-page illustra- 

 tions. On the ledges of this one section we see 

 trunks and stumps of fifteen or twenty ancient 

 forests ranged one above another, standing where 

 they grew, or prostrate and broken like the pil- 

 lars of ruined temples in desert sands, — a forest 

 fifteen or twenty stories high, the roots of each 

 spread above the tops of the next beneath it, tell- 

 ing wonderful tales of the bygone centuries, with 

 their winters and summers, growth and death, 

 fire, ice, and flood. 



