270 
The Colorado River 
In many places we would lower a boat by lines near the shore, 
with two men in her, and when a rock appeared they fended 
her off, or jumped into the water and eased the craft along, 
touching bottom where they could. This worked very well for 
this place and the stage of water, though on this river one 
must ever be ready to adapt himself to differing conditions. 
Rapids were very numerous, but we succeeded in passing them 
in one way or another without seriously injuring the boats. 
The walls grew to magnificent proportions. At one camp we 
could see, on the very top of the cliff opposite, an object that 
from our position was the counterpart of a log cabin. Tall 
pines grew around it and the deception was complete. The 
cliff being twenty-four hundred feet high, the “cabin “ must 
in reality have been of huge size; but we applied the name 
“Log-Cabin Cliff” to the place. At a heavy descent, where 
the Emma Dean of the first expedition was swamped, we took 
no chances and made a careful let-down; a little farther on we 
did the same thing again. This method of passing a rapid is 
not romantic, but our object was not to perform spectacular 
feats but to accomplish the work in hand; so wherever there 
was any doubt as to the safety of running a rapid we adopted 
the prudent course. It was difficult to decide sometimes just 
where to draw the line; in one rapid we tried to go through, 
the Nell struck a rock, knocking Thompson out and nearly 
capsizing, but no real harm was done. The walls increased to 
nearly three thousand feet, and the rapids followed each other 
in quick succession every day. At one point we saw, a couple 
of thousand feet above on the right a gigantic example of the 
natural arches. Beyond this the walls began to grow some¬ 
what lower. Our life through this gorge, as well as through 
some others, might be described by the monotonous phrase, 
“Got up, ran rapids, went to bed.” There was no time to 
do anything else. At night we were always sleepy and tired. 
Fortunately there were here fine places to camp—plenty of 
room, with smooth sand to sleep on. As soon as we halted 
for the night we would don our dry clothes from the rubber 
bags, and, when supper was over, would prepare a bed. If any 
kind of boughs or willows were to be had, we cut a quantity 
