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Updated: May 16, 2025
We had a delicious gallop over the sands to the Waiakea river, which we crossed, and came upon one of the vast lava-flows of ages since, over which we had to ride carefully, as the pahoehoe lies in rivers, coils, tortuosities, and holes partially concealed by a luxuriant growth of ferns and convolvuli.
Volcanic ash, or bole, is frequently found separating the different lava-flows; and in the upper amygdaloidal sheets numerous secondary minerals are found, such as quartz, agate and jasper, stilbite and chlorite. The total thickness of the whole series, where complete, is about 6,000 feet, divided as follows: 1. Upper trap; with ash and inter-trappean beds 1,500 feet 2.
Their resemblance to the great trappean series of Western India, even in minute particulars, is referred to by Mr. Blanford, who suggests the view that they belong to one and the same great series of lava-flows extruded over the surface of this part of the globe. This view is inherently probable. Beds of volcanic ash or breccia also frequently occur, and often contain augite crystals.
Here is a beautiful mass of green, and not far away the trail that leads from the plateau to the river is in sight. El Tovar Point. Its elevation is seven thousand feet. Coconino Forest and Angel Plateau. To the west and south is the Coconino Forest; beyond is seen the dry bed of the ancient Eocene lake, and the blue ridge, where the lava-flows from Mount Floyd shut in the view.
But far the greater part of the plateau is good sound desert, rocky, sandy, or fluffy with loose ashes and dust, dissected in some places into a labyrinth of stream-channel chasms like cracks in a dry clay-bed, or the narrow slit crevasses of glaciers, blackened with lava-flows, dotted with volcanoes and beautiful buttes, and lined with long continuous escarpments, a vast bed of sediments of an ancient sea-bottom, still nearly as level as when first laid down after being heaved into the sky a mile or two high.
Twenty-three miles around stretched the dizzy wells of the crater. We stood on the edge of the nearly vertical western wall, and the floor of the crater lay nearly half a mile beneath. This floor, broken by lava-flows and cinder-cones, was as red and fresh and uneroded as if it were but yesterday that the fires went out.
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