Lawson.] 



The Upper Kern Bit sin. 



337 



Sierra Nevada, not only in the direction of its trend, but also in 

 the remarkable and unbroken straightness of its trend. This 

 rectilinear character of the canon persists for about 28 miles and 

 is undoubtedly determined by a structural control of the erosion. 

 In view of what has been said of the homogeniety of the rocks of 

 the Upper Kern Basin, it is difficult to imagine the nature of this 

 structural control if it be not due to a straight rift. (3) On the 

 west side of the canon about a mile and a half north of the mouth 

 of Coyote Creek there is, above the brink of the canon, an uneven 

 terrace backed by a cliff which has all the characters of a fault 

 scarp, as yet but little degraded and having a height of about 150 

 or. 200 feet. The Hue of the apparent fault is parallel to the west 

 wall of the canon and traverses, for an observed distance of about 

 a mile, an uneven, or rolling, rocky slope, which corresponds to 

 the transitional slopes at the rear of Chagoopa Plateau. The 

 terrace in front of the scarp has the same uneven and rolling 

 character as the surface above it, and is clearly discriminated 

 from. a stream terrace by this fact, and by the fact that the back 

 of the terrace is not horizontal, but is solely determined by the 

 intersection of this uneven surface with the plane of the scarp. 

 A critical inspection of this scarp and terrace from the opposite 

 side of the canon, on the upper part of the trail to Volcano Creek, 

 failed to suggest any other possibility than that we have here an 

 actual fault, whereby a great slab of the west wall has dropped 

 through a distance measured by the height of the scarp. 



(■i) There are certain short rectangular jogs or reentrants in 

 the course of the canon walls which are difficult to explain as 

 products of erosion , but which are iu cosonance with the hypoth- 

 thesis of rifting with sinking of slabs of the canon walls. 



(5) The rocks traversed by the canon are prevailingly gray 

 granite, but along the west wall of the canon below the Kern- 

 Kaweah river there is a red streak running through the prevail- 

 ing gray. This red streak was followed for some miles and was 

 found to be distributed in a plane parallel to the wall and crop- 

 ping out in its upper part. At one of the jogs above referred to, 

 below Red Spur, this red streak crosses from the west wall to the 

 east wall, and there has a similar distribution nearly as far as 

 the upper Funstou Camp. The character of this red streak could 



