A Stupendous Rift in the Earth.
By Sel.
PROBABLY few rivers are less generally known than the "Colorado of the West." Rising in Colorado and Wyoming, it runs through a country of peerless beauty, through pleasant valleys, rocky mountains, high plateaus, arid deserts, finally debouching into the California Gulf, nearly 3,000 miles from its starting place. It drains an area of nearly 400,000 square miles. It is the river of cañons. From the junction of the Green and Grand Rivers to Colville it has but few breaks in what forms probably the most stupendous rift in the world. Five hundred miles in length is the cut, with a maximum depth of 6,500 feet, an average that exceeds 3,000. Americans are too apt to overlook their own country, and travel to other lands in search of the picturesque. To the geologist, the earnest student of nature, the artist, or the mere sight-seer, this country offers inducements unparalleled. Looking south across the House Rock Valley, in northern Arizona, one notices a few broken bluffs, about ten miles distant, apparently about twenty feet high. Only five or six of these occur, scattered at irregular intervals. There lies the cañon. Riding across the level plain toward the bluffs, one finds it hard to conceive how such a cañon can exist, with so few signs of its existence. Here and there we are obliged to make long detours, to avoid yawning crevasses that streams have worn in their downward rush to the Colorado. Until we come within a half a mile of the cañon we get no hint of its existence. Gradually it unfolds to nearer advance, until on its brink its awful sublimity bursts upon us. As we walk out upon a projecting tongue of rock, we gradually, dimly begin to appreciate the chasm. Great rock walls around us on every side stretch downward, seemingly fathomless.—Sel.