iles across from rim to rim,
a mile high from water to rim-level, the climax of the world of canyons
and the most gorgeous spectacle on earth, is the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado. It lies east and west in the northern part of the State.

To comprehend it, recall one of those ditches which we all have seen
crossing level fields or bordering country roads. It is broad from rim
to rim and deeply indented by the side washes which follow heavy
showers. Its sides descend by terraces, steep in places with gentle
slopes between the steeps, and on these slopes are elevations of rock or
mud which floods have failed to wash away. Finally, in the middle, is
the narrow trench which now, in dry weather, carries a small trickling
stream. Not only does this ditch roughly typify the Grand Canyon,
reproducing in clumsy, inefficient miniature the basic characteristics
of its outline, but it also is identical in the process of its making.

Imagining it in cross-section, we find its sides leading down by
successive precipices to broad intermediate sloping surfaces. We find
upon these broad surfaces enormous mesas and lofty, ornately carved
edifices of rock which the floods have left standing. We find in its
middle, winding snakelike from side to side, the narrow gorge of the
river.

The parallel goes further. It is not at all necessary to conceive that
either the wayside ditch or the Grand Canyon was once brimful of madly
dashing waters. On the contrary, neither may ever have held much greater
streams than they hold to-day. In both cases the power of the stream has
been applied to downward trenching; the greater spreading sides were cut
by the erosion of countless side streamlets resulting temporarily from
periods of melting snow or of local rainfall. It was these streamlets
which cut the side canyons and left standing between them the bold
promontories of the rim. It was these streamlets, working from the
surface, which separated portions of these promontories from the plateau
and turned them into isolated mesas. It was the erosion of these mesas
which turned many of them into the gigantic and fantastic temples and
towers which rise from the canyon's bowl.

Standing upon the rim and overlooking miles of these successive
precipices and intermediate templed levels, we see the dark gorge of the
granite trench, and, deep within it, wherever its windings permit a view
of its bottom, a narrow ribbon of brown river. This is the Colorado--a
ri