ressed with the marvellous beauty of outline, the
infinite complication of these titanic buttes," wrote F.S. Dellenbaugh,
topographer of the Powell party, on his second visit. "It is doubtful if
in this respect the valley has its equal. Not even the Grand Canyon
offers a more varied spectacle; yet all is welded together in a superb
ensemble."

"Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of Little Zion Canyon," wrote
C.E. Dutton. "In its proportions it is about equal to Yosemite, but in
the nobility and beauty of its sculptures there is no comparison. It is
Hyperion to a Satyr. No wonder the fierce Mormon zealot who named it was
reminded of the Great Zion on which his fervid thoughts were bent, of
'houses not built with hands, eternal in the heavens.'"

And Doctor G.K. Gilbert, whose intimate study of its recesses has become
a geological classic, declared it "the most wonderful defile" that it
had been even his experienced fortune to behold.

Technical literature contains other outbursts of enthusiastic
admiration, some of eloquence, hidden, however, among pages so
incomprehensible to the average lover of the sublime in Nature that the
glory of Little Zion was lost in its very discovery. So remote did it
lie from the usual lines of travel and traffic that, though its
importance resulted in its conservation as a national monument in 1909,
it was six or seven years more before its fame as a spectacle of the
first order began to get about. The tales of adventurous explorers, as
usual, were discounted. It was not until agencies seeking new tourist
attractions sent parties to verify reports that the public gaze was
centred upon the canyon's supreme loveliness.

[Illustration]

To picture Zion one must recall that the great plateau in which the
Virgin River has sunk these canyons was once enormously higher than now.
The erosion of hundreds of thousands, or, if you please, millions of
years, has cut down and still is cutting down the plateau. These
"Cyclopean steps," each step the thickness of a stratum or a series of
strata of hardened sands, mark progressive stages in the decomposition
of the whole.

Little Zion Canyon is an early stage in Nature's process of levelling
still another sandstone step, that is all; this one fortunately of many
gorgeous hues. From the top of this layer we may look down thousands of
vertical feet into the painted canyon whose river still is sweeping out
the sands that Nature chisels from the cli