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The writer has heard many tales how Lee worked rich gold deposits nearby, how he explored the river and its canyons and how, for a time, he was in seclusion among the Hava-Supai Indians in the remote Cataract Canyon, to which, there was assumption, he had brought the fruit seeds from which sprang the Indian orchards.
Perchance, also, one may see a band of mountain sheep, for now that they are so strictly preserved, a heavy penalty being exacted both by the state and federal governments for killing one, they are increasing in numbers. One of their usual haunts for years has been in the canyons and ravines north of Shiva Temple.
When day dawned, they left the mesas and kept to the dense brush of the canyons; were almost lost, so crooked their path; but the Indian guided them, and constantly sniffed for the salty air from the ocean. In the middle of the day they rested; their soles, knees, and hands were raw, and body and limb burned with the cactus; their throats were parched for lack of water.
These mesas are but minor plateaus that are separated by canyons and canyon valleys, and sometimes by low sage plains. They rise from a few hundred to 2,000 or 3,000 feet above the lowlands on which they are founded. The distinction between plateaus and mesas is vague; in fact, in local usage the term mesa is usually applied to all of these tables which do not carry volcanic mountains.
Among the rocks pools and lakelets are found, and little streams run in canyons that seem like chasms cleft to nadir hell. San Rafael River and Fremont River drain this Castle land, heading in the Wasatch Plateau and flowing into the Grand River. Along these streams a few narrow canyon valleys are found, and in them Ute Indians make their winter homes.
He was at the edge of another of those terrible canyons, the eighth he had crossed, whose precipitous sides would have taxed to the uttermost the strength of an untired man well fortified by food and water, and for the first time, as he looked down into the abyss and then at the opposite side that he must scale, misgivings began to assail his mind.
When a succession of dry years occurs the canyons coming through the cliffs are choked below, as vast bodies of sand are deposited. But now and then, ten or twenty years apart, great storms or successions of storms come, and the channels are flooded and cut their way again through the drifting sands to solid rock below.
All this is of historic record in stony cypher of geology indelibly engraved by time on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as traceable from the primordial archaean to our present era, the age of man.
Ear-splitting detonations echoed from crag to crag, and down deep into the valleys and canyons, setting the world alive with a sudden chaos. Peal after peal roared over the hills, and the lightning played, hissing and shrieking upon ironstone crowns, like a blinding display of pyrotechnics. There was no pause in the sudden storm. There was no mercy for wretched human nerves.
We worked over the creek bottom below, rode over adjacent hills and canyons, struck cold trails here and there to assure us that bear really existed, then at about ten o'clock Murphy decided that weather conditions of the night before, combined with the dissipating effect of sunshine and the lateness of the hour, all dictated that we had best give up the game for that day.
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