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We camp at night on the right bank, having made 26 miles. July 8. This morning Bradley and I go out to climb, and gain an altitude of more than 2,000 feet above the river, but still do not reach the summit of the wall. After dinner we pass through a region of the wildest desolation. The canyon is very tortuous, the river very rapid, and many lateral canyons enter on either side.
The walls, while not sheer, were nearly so; they might be climbed in many places to the top of the granite; but the tonto sandstone wall nearly always overhangs this, breaks sheer, and seldom affords an outlet to the plateaus above, except where lateral canyons cut through.
The monotony of the yellow walls broke in change of color and smooth surface, and the rugged outline of rims grew craggy. Splits appeared in deep breaks, and gorges running at right angles, and then the Pass opened wide at a junction of intersecting canyons.
James Baker, an old-time mountaineer, once told me about a party of men starting down the river, and Ashley was named as one. The story runs that the boat was swamped, and some of the party drowned in one of the canyons below. The word "Ashley" is a warning to us, and we resolve on great caution. Ashley Falls is the name we give to the cataract.
It's only used for pasture no farmin' to speak of." The hills were bare and grassy. Only the canyons were wooded, while the higher and more distant hills were furry with chaparral. Once they saw a coyote slide into the brush, and once Billy wished for a gun when a large wildcat stared at them malignantly and declined to run until routed by a clod of earth that burst about its ears like shrapnel.
With cattle scattered over two counties of buttes and canyons, we feel in a hurry when we get started home, after an absence sure to have been longer than we intended. Then, you know how I feel; I wish the old town well, but I don't enjoy every incident of my visits there. "We expect to see the Cecil Barr-Smiths in New York.
From this point I can look off to the west, up side canyons of the Colorado, and see the edge of a great plateau, from which streams run down into the Colorado, and deep gulches in the escarpment which faces us, continued by canyons, ragged and flaring and set with cliffs and towering crags, down to the river.
I thought of these great American canyons as I looked down into the Bromo Sand Sea. By noon this was a great ten-mile long valley of silver sand which glittered in the sunlight like a great silver carpeted ballroom floor. Tourists from all over the world have thrilled to its strange beauty.
There were mountains, he guessed from what the boy had told him; and canyons and heavy timber. The thought of having some definite, attainable goal cheered him so much that he went to sleep again, sitting hunched down in the seat with his hat over his eyes, so that no one could see his face; and since no one but the man who sold it had ever seen him in that sport suit, he felt almost safe.
Above this point there were several places where one could climb out, we had even seen signs of ancient trails in two side canyons, below here few such places existed. Smith listened to all this attentively, then smiled and said "I guess there will be some way through." After a short visit he returned to his camp.
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