8 



JOHN BURROUGHS 



in the style in which I made my first journey amid the 

 Catskills in my youth. But how tame were the Catskills 

 of memory in comparison with the snow-capped ranges 





SAGEBRUSH PLAIN. 



that bound our horizon fifty or a hundred miles away — 

 to the north the Saw Tooth Range and ' Old Soldier,' white 

 as a snow bank; to the southeast the Goose Creek Range; 

 and to the south the Humboldts, far away in Nevada. 

 Our course lay across what was once a sea of molten 

 lava. Our geologists said that sometime in the remote 

 past the crust of the earth here had probably cracked 

 over a wide area, allowing the molten lava to flow up 

 through it, like water through rents in the ice, and inun- 

 date thousands of square miles of surface, extending even 

 to the Columbia, many hundred miles distant. This old 

 lava bed is now an undulating sagebrush plain, appearing 

 here and there in broken, jagged outcroppings, or in 

 broad, flat plates like a dark cracked pavement still in 

 place, but partly hidden under a yellowish brown soil. 

 The road was a crooked one, but fairly good. Its course 



