THE GRAND CANON 



important feature since they first came to 

 light at the close of the Glacial Period. 



The so-called Grand Colorado Plateau, of 

 which the Grand Canon is only one of the well- 

 proportioned features, extends with a breadth 

 of hundreds of miles from the flanks of the 

 Wahsatch and Park Mountains to the south 

 of the San Francisco Peaks. Immediately to 

 the north of the deepest part of the canon it 

 rises in a series of subordinate plateaus, diver- 

 sified with green meadows, marshes, bogs, 

 ponds, forests, and grovy park valleys, a fav- 

 orite Indian hunting-ground, inhabited by 

 elk, deer, beaver, etc. But far the greater 

 part of the plateau is good sound desert, rocky, 

 sandy, or fluffy with loose ashes and dust, 

 dissected in some places into a labyrinth of 

 stream-channel chasms like cracks in a dry 

 clay-bed, or the narrow slit crevasses of gla- 

 ciers — blackened with lava-flows, dotted with 

 volcanoes and beautiful buttes, and lined with 

 long continuous escarpments — a vast bed 

 of sediments of an ancient sea-bottom, still 

 nearly as level as when first laid down after 

 being heaved into the sky a mile or two high. 



Walking quietly about in the alleys and by- 

 ways of the Grand Canon city, we learn some- 

 thing of the way it was made; and all must 

 admire effects so great from means apparently 



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