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Sierra Club Bulletin 



low valley. Suddenly the floor of the prairie came to an end, 

 and we halted on the crest of a cliff overlooking a vast ex- 

 panse of desert lowland. The desert was not a monotonous 

 plain, like that of northwestern Utah, but a land of mesas, 

 cafions, buttes, and chffs, all so bare that the brilliant colors of 

 their rocks shone forth — orange, red, chocolate, blue, and 

 white — fading slowly into the gray of the remote distance. We 

 were looking across the broad barren tract through which the 

 Colorado winds in Glen and Marble cafions, and of which the 

 Painted Desert of Arizona is a minor division. To most of us 

 it was a supreme vision of beauty and grandeur as well as des- 

 olation, a scene for which words were inadequate; and we 

 stood spellbound. The silence was at last broken by Kipp, 

 who exclaimed, 'Well, we're nicely caught !' and his discordant 

 note so carried us from the sublime to tHe ridiculous that our 

 tense emotion found first expression in a laugh. 



'The reminiscent story has been told to illustrate the rela- 

 tion of the traveler's appreciation to his point of view. Kipp 

 saw only that the cliff at our feet barred further progress in 

 that direction, and all that had appealed to the others most 

 strongly was lost on him. Hoxie, Weiss, and I doubtless saw 

 different things in the landscape, for we were trained in di- 

 verse schools, but our personal points of view all included the 

 esthetic factor, and that factor lifted us above the plane of 

 petty annoyance into a realm of exalted emotion. We saw 

 what we had eyes to see. Our point of view was the measure 

 of our perception and appreciation."* 



When a member of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, in 

 1899, Gilbert seemed still in the prime of physical vigor, never 

 hesitating tO' undertake active and difficult work among moun- 

 tains and glaciers, undeterred by hardship or danger. His 

 most noteworthy side trips perhaps were one to the glaciers of 

 Geike and Reid inlets, traversing in a small boat, accompanied 

 by Muir and Palache, the ice-choked channel of the northwest 

 arm of Glacier Bay, and camping on the bare rock close to the 

 ice; and one in Prince William Sound, where, with Coville and 

 Palache, he explored and mapped the most stupendous glacier 

 visited by the expedition, a glacier having a sea-wall frontage 



* Sierra Club Bulletin, p. 225, Jan., 1908. 



