Lake Ramparts. 



225 



LAKE RAMPARTS.* 



By G. K. Gilbert. 



One summer afternoon, thirty-five years ago, I rode 

 along a high plateau in southern Utah. My companions 

 were Hoxie, a young army officer; Weiss, a veteran 

 topographer, who mapped our route as we went; and 

 Kipp, an assistant whose primary duty was to carry a 

 barometer. Not far behind us was a pack-train. We 

 were explorers, studying the geography and geology of 

 a strange land. About us was a forest of pine and fir, 

 but we rode through a lane of sunlit prairie cradled in a 

 shallow valley. Suddenly the floor of the prairie came 

 to an end, and we halted on the crest of a cliff over- 

 looking a vast expanse of desert lowland. The desert 

 was not a monotonous plain, like that of northwestern 

 Utah, but a land of mesas, canons, buttes, and cliffs, 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 Colo- 

 rado winds in Glen and Marble canons, 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 desolation, a scene for which words were inade- 

 quate ; 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 

 relation of the traveler's appreciation to his point of view. 

 Kipp saw only that the cliff at our feet barred further 



* Published by permission of the Director of the U. S. Geological Survey. 



