94 EXPLORING EXPEDITION FROM SANTA FE 



there, the base of the section in Canon Pintado. The sandstone is here yellow or 

 straw-color, very massive, without fossils, and very remarkably cross-stratified. About 

 lour hundred feet of this stratum arc here exposed. 



Below this succeed one hundred and fifty feet of red, foliated sandstone, with 

 some bands of red shale, precisely like the red sandstones of New Jersey and the 

 Connecticut River Valley. Below this two hundred and seventy feet of reddish-brown 

 sandstone, very massive, forming- perpendicular faces. Still below, a series of green 

 and red thin-bedded sandstones and red and purple shales, three hundred and fifty feet 

 in thickness. The strata here rise gently to the westward, till, at a point ten miles 

 from Camp 28, a low anticlinal crosses our route. From thence to the river the dip is 

 westward. This part of the canon is exceedingly grand and beautiful, both from the 

 form and coloring of its walls. A few pinons and cedars cling to the sides and crown 

 the summits of the Avails, while scattered cottonwoods and thickets of willow, with 

 here and there a small tree of a new and peculiar species of ash, form a narrow thread 

 of vegetation along its bottom. This, and many similar gorges, form the channels 

 through which the drainage of the western slope of the Sierra Abajo reaches the Col- 

 orado. Twelve miles west from the Ojo Verde the several canons unite by the elimi- 

 nation of their dividing walls, and debouch into a comparatively open country. De- 

 scending the canon we, therefore, at its month come out upon a third distinct plateau, 

 from which the mesa cut by the Canon Colorado has been removed; its edges reced- 

 ing in magnificent broken walls south and northwest. From this point the view swept 

 westward over a Avide extent of country, in its general aspects a plain, but everywhere 

 deeply cut by a tangled maze of canons, and thickly set witli towers, castles, and spires 

 of most varied and striking forms; the most wonderful monuments of erosion which 

 our eyes, already experienced in objects of this kind, had beheld. Near the mesa we 

 were leaving stand detached portions of it of every possible form, from broad, Hat 

 tables to slender cones crowned with pinnacles of the massive sandstone which 

 forms the perpendicular faces of the walls of the Canon Colorado. These castellated 

 buttes are from one thousand to fifteen hundred feet in height, and no language is ad- 

 equate to convey a just idea of the strange and impressive scenery formed by their 

 grand and varied outlines. Toward the west the view reached some thirty miles, there 

 bounded by long lines and bold angles of mesa walls similar to those behind us, while 

 in the intervening space the surface was diversified by columns, spires, castles, ami 

 battlemented towers of colossal but often beautiful proportions, closely resembling 

 elaborate structures of art, but in effect far surpassing the most imposing monuments 

 of human skill. In the southwest was a long line of spires of white stone, standing 

 on red bases, thousands in number, but so slender as to recall the most delicate carv- 

 ing in ivory or the fairy architecture of some Gothic cathedral; yet many, perhaps 

 most, were over five hundred feet in height, and thickly set in a narrow belt or series 

 some miles in length. Their appearance was so strange and beautiful as to call out 

 exclamations of delight from all our party. 



Next to the pinnacles the most striking objects in our view were buttes of dark, 

 chocolate-colored rock, which had weathered into exact imitation of some of the feudal 

 castles of the Old World; yet, like all the other features in the scene, they were on a, 



