TEEEACE CANONS. 167 
Yellow Hills. This country is elaborately embossed with low, rounded, 
naked hills. The rocks from which they are carved are yellow clays and 
shales. Some, few of the shales are slate colored, others pink ; none so glar 
ing and brilliant as the bad-lands of Black's Fork, but the tints are soft and 
delicate. The whole country is carved by a net-work of water-ways, which 
descend rapidly toward Green River, and the intervening hills are entirely 
destitute of vegetation. Looking at it from an eminence, and in the light 
of the mid-day sun, it appears like a billowy sea of molten gold. 
To the south of these yellow hills, and separated from them by a gently 
curved, but well defined ridge of upturned sandstone, there is a broad 
stretch of red and buff colored bad-lands. Some of the beds are highly 
bituminous, and a fresh fracture reveals a black surface, but usually they 
weather gray. Where these bituminous rocks are found, hills and mesas are 
seen, covered, more or less, with vegetation, and the bad-land forms disap 
pear. Still farther to the south, across White River, we find a continuation 
of these beds, but here more shaly, and interstratified with harder beds, 
and the alcove structure appears, somewhat like that in the Alcove Land 
near Green River Station. These White River alcove lands were, by Gen 
eral Hughes, named " Goblin City." 
THE TERRACE CANONS AND CLIFFS. 
A few miles south of the mouth of the Uinta, Green River enters the 
Canon of Desolation. The walls of this gorge steadily increase in altitude 
to its foot, where it terminates abruptly at the Brown Cliffs; then the river 
immediately enters Gray Canon, with low walls, steadily increasing in alti 
tude until the foot is reached, where it terminates abruptly at the Book Cliffs. 
In like manner the walls of Labyrinth Canon are low above, and increase 
in altitude as we descend the river, until the canon terminates as those above, 
in a line of cliffs. To these last we have given the name Orange Cliffs. 
We sometimes call these the Terrace Canons. They are cut through 
three great inclined plateaus. 
Conceive of three geographic terraces, many hundred feet high, and 
many miles in width, forming a great stairway, from the Toom'-pin Wu- 
near' Tu-weap', below, to the valley of the Uinta, above. The lower step 
