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Like acid spread on copperplate, water etches the canyons in the mountain slopes and spreads wide the valleys through the plains. Among these scarcely known ranges of the Rocky Mountain chain the Western rivers have their beginnings. When white men crowded the Indian from the plains he retreated to the mountains, and in their valleys made his final stand against the aggressor.
The mountain rises ten thousand feet above the general level of the country, in blank exposure to the deep upper currents of the sky, and no labyrinth of peaks and canyons I had ever been in seemed to me so dangerous as these immense slopes, bare against the sky. The frost was intense, and drifting snow dust made breathing at times rather difficult.
I could not help but be amused, and feel a little uncomfortable too, when I saw how nearly I came to being wrecked here, after having escaped that fate in the rapids of the canyons. I ran my boat back to the diverting canal, then rowed down to the massive cement gates, which looked to me like a small replica of some of the locks on the Panama Canal.
All morning they rode slowly, over rough trails in the mountains where a horse found scant foothold, where they wound down into deep, close walled canyons where the sunlight was dim at noon, where the pines stood tall and straight in thick ranks untouched by an ax.
The new line traversed the country from Serros, capital of Dawsbergen, through the mountains and canyons of Graustark, across Axphain's broad steppes and lowlands, to a point at which Russia stood ready to begin a connecting branch for junction with her great line to the Pacific.
The height of the Carolyn Bridge is two hundred and five feet and the span one hundred and eighty-six feet. All these bridges span canyons whose depths correspond to the height of the arched structures. In White Canyon, a few miles below Edwin Bridge, under its overhanging rock walls, are the ruins of numerous cliff-dwellings.
It is the same cliff as at supper time. Lying down again, it is the cliff as seen in profile, with a long slope and distant summit. Musing on this, I forget "the morrow and the canyons to come"; I have found a way to estimate the altitude and slope of an inclination, in like manner as I can judge of distance along the horizon. The reason is simple. A reference to the stereoscope will suggest it.
Coming down Lodore and Whirlpool canyons, we cut through the southern slope of the Uinta Mountains; and the lower end of this latter canyon runs into the spur, but, instead of splitting it the whole length, the river wheels to the right at the foot of Whirlpool Canyon in a great curve to the northwest through Island Park.
It resembles Kauai in that it is the first-formed and therefore the oldest island, so that it had had time sufficient to break down its lava rock into the richest soil, and to erode the canyons between the ancient craters until they are like Grand Canyons of the Colorado, with numberless waterfalls plunging thousands of feet in the sheer or dissipating into veils of vapour, and evanescing in mid-air to descend softly and invisibly through a mirage of rainbows, like so much dew or gentle shower, upon the abyss-floors.
They lie on rude and unexpected granite shelves, as Le Conte Lake; under the shadow of towering peaks, as Gilmore Lake; on bald glacier-gouged and polished tables, as those of Desolation Valley; embosomed in deep woods, as Fallen Leaf, Heather and Cascade; in the rocky recesses of sloping canyons, as Susie, Lucile and the Angoras; hidden in secret recesses of giant granite walls, as Eagle; or sprawling in the open, as Loon, Spider, etc.
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