ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT 



Geokge Bucknam Doer 

 Custodian, Sieur de Monts National Monument 



In the summer of 1902 I found myself one August 

 afternoon, when corn was ripe and grapes were ripening, 

 starting out on horseback from the Mormon village of 

 Kanab, where the Kanab river issues from the Vermilion 

 Cliffs onto the Antelope Plains, to find what geologists 

 familiar with the West had told me was one of its most 

 wonderful sights, the Zion Creek canyon of the north 

 fork of the Virgin River. That canyon has now become 

 a national monument, Zion by name; while the island 

 on the coast of Maine which I had left some weeks 

 before to seek that region has become, in its main 

 mountain range, a national monument also, the Sieur 

 de Monts. 



These two monuments, each in its own way a natural 

 park of supreme landscape interest, exhibit remarkably 

 in their difference the extraordinary range of natural 

 scenery that the National Park Service, step by step, is 

 reaching out to cover. What the Sieur de Monts Monu- 

 ment is and stands for, other papers in this series tell; 

 in contrast, it seems worth while to tell of its far-off 

 companion whose surrounding is the desert, beautiful 

 as the ocean in its way, and whose sculptor has been 

 not ice and ocean, as the Sieur de Monts, but a stream, 

 plunging steeply down to lose its waters in the western 

 ocean. 



The immense solitudes of that region, heightened only 

 in effect by their occasional life, dominate the impression 



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