234 
NOTES OF AN AMERICAN TOUR. 
100 miles ; and at the summit level in crossing the mountain 
range there is a snow-shed covering in the line for as much 
as forty-five miles length to protect it from avalanches on 
the mountain side, through which the train travels for nearly 
two hours. 
Salt Lake City was reached in two days and nights’ 
journey from San Francisco ; it lies in a fine position, a 
great fertile plain 4,000 feet above the sea, bounded on all 
sides by ranges of snow-capped mountains at distances of 
about 30 to 130 miles, ail showing bright and near in that 
clear atmosphere, so that it is impossible to form any idea of 
their real distance. The Great Salt Lake is ten miles away 
from the city, and is really an inland sea seventy miles long. 
The water is intensely salt, and said to be seven times salter 
than sea water, and it gives an odd sensation- of buoyancy in 
bathing in the lake; you cannot touch the bottom after 
reaching little more than four feet depth, but float about 
ignominiously like a cork. 
Salt Lake City is a strange rambling place, with the main 
streets very wide, but generally only in the condition of 
country roads, and they have rows of trees on each side, 
with open running streams of water. Looking down from 
the high ground north of the city, the sight is very singular; 
a great number of the houses, large and small, stand in 
gardens, and only in some of the principal streets are the 
houses joined up together to a continuous frontage. State 
Eoad runs through the city from north to south, and extends 
in a continuous straight line for a length of twenty-five miles, 
on to the foot of the surrounding mountains. At the head 
of it are the great Mormon Tabernacle and their Temple, 
which has now been thirty years building, but has not yet 
got a roof on, and from all appearance may now never be 
finished, as Mormonism seems to have got its death-blow in 
the place. 
From Salt Lake City a run of 600 miles through the Rocky 
Mountain district brought us again to Pueblo, where the 
out-going course of the journey was crossed. This run was of 
special interest, through extraordinary rock gorges, showing 
very fantastic forms of gigantic rocks standing up like ruined 
castles and fortifications; and passing over several lofty 
summits, one of them 11,000 feet above the sea, about the 
highest railway in the world. The intermediate valleys were 
singularly beautiful with flowers, and at one part there was 
something like twenty miles length of railway, with the 
ground on each side literally carpeted with great masses of 
flowers of lovely varied colours, and extending as far as the 
