Such a. country as that to the west I have never seen and 
never hope to see again. It is dry as a desert, as monotonous 
as a plain, and as complicated and impenetrable as a labyrinth, 
feut it must be explored; the dry canyons must be meandered and 
the blazing-hot plateaus plotted. The glistening thread of the 
San Juan is our only hope, When that river is once reached we 
can make running trips from it to the north and south and prob¬ 
ably be able to connect with the work on the Dolores to the north 
and reach the line on the south. 
A 
The rock of this mountain is a trachite , very hard, with 
much black hornblend and breaks off in small plates which rattle 
and jingle under our feet. Fragments of the cretaceous shale 
and of numbers 2 and 3 cretaceous have been caught up in the 
trachite and may be seen in places nearly all over the Ute 
mountain group. The beds in general have not been raised much 
excepting the bending up at the edges, as seen at the south 
end. The canyon of the McElrno cuts through the slight!^ anti¬ 
clinal under the north face of the peak, exposing about 1000 
feet of shales beneath No. 1, 300 of which are red. 
July 31. This morning we said goodbye to Naio Guinnep 
and How-do-do Bueno, who with their people had boarded for 
three days with us. These Indians have been quite useful to 
us*** but they eat like fury. I started down the McElmo ex- 
