138 EXPLORATION OF THE CANONS OF THE COLORADO. 
sandstone rock, traversed in all directions by a perfect labyrinth of narrow 
gorges, sometimes seeming to cross each other, but finally uniting in a prin 
cipal one, whose black line could be traced, cutting its way to the Colorado, 
a few miles above the mouth of the San Juan River. 
The perilous character of the journey of Mr. Hamblin and party was 
apparent. For eighty miles they traveled in a canon, finding, in all that 
distance, but two places where the walls could be scaled. They crossed, 
recrossed, waded, and sometimes swam a rapid stream, that often filled the 
gorge from wall to wall. A single shower, on the rock land above, would 
have changed the stream to a raging torrent, that would have swept them 
into the Colorado, or imprisoned them in some rock walled alcove, with no 
possible way of escape. 
Away to the east, and fifty miles distant, rose the Henry Mountains, 
their gray slopes streaked with long lines of white by the snow which yet 
remained in the gulches near their summits. On our voyage down the Colo 
rado River, in 1871, we had determined the mouth of the Dirty Devil River 
to be about thirty miles northeast from these mountains, making it at least 
eighty miles from our present camp, and directly across the net work of 
caiions before us. To proceed farther in the direction we had been pursu 
ing was impossible. No animal without wings could cross the deep gulches 
in the sandstone basin at our feet. The stream which we had followed, and 
whose course soon became lost in the multitude of chasms before us, was 
not the one we were in search of, but an unknown, unnamed river, draining 
the eastern slope of the Aquarius Plateau, and flowing, through a deep, 
narrow caiion, to the Colorado River. Believing our party to be the discov 
erers, we decided to call this stream, in honor of Father Escalarite, the old 
Spanish explorer, Escalante River, and the country which it drains, Esca- 
lante Basin. 
The western boundary of the basin is the vertical wall forming the east 
ern edge of the Kai-par'-o-wits Plateau. From the very base of this cliff, 
the drainage is to the Escalante River, by narrow, deep canons, presenting 
apparently impassable barriers to travel toward the south. To the north, 
and twenty miles away, rose the eastern slope of the Aquarius Plateau. Its 
general trend is north and south, but away to the northwest, and about forty 
