e spurs streaked with streams, made famous by early explorers
and hunters. It is a river of rivers--the Du Chesne, San Rafael, Yampa,
Dolores, Gunnison, Cochetopa, Uncompahgre, Eagle, and Roaring Rivers,
the Green and the Grand, and scores of others with branches innumerable,
as mad and glad a band as ever sang on mountains, descending in glory
of foam and spray from snow-banks and glaciers through their rocky
moraine-dammed, beaver-dammed channels. Then, all emerging from dark
balsam and pine woods and coming together, they meander through wide,
sunny park valleys, and at length enter the great plateau and flow in
deep canyons, the beginning of the system culminating in this grand
canyon of canyons.

Our warm canyon camp is also a good place to give a thought to the
glaciers which still exist at the heads of the highest tributaries. Some
of them are of considerable size, especially those on the Wind River
and Sawatch ranges in Wyoming and Colorado. They are remnants of a vast
system of glaciers which recently covered the upper part of the Colorado
basin, sculptured its peaks, ridges, and valleys to their present forms,
and extended far out over the plateau region--how far I cannot now say.
It appears, therefore, that, however old the main trunk of the Colorado
may be, all its widespread upper branches and the landscapes they flow
through are new-born, scarce at all changed as yet in any important
feature since they first came to light at the close of the Glacial
Period.

The so-called Grand Colorado Plateau, of which the Grand Canyon is
only one of the well-proportioned features, extends with a breadth of
hundreds of miles from the flanks of the Wahsatch and Park Mountains to
the south of the San Francisco Peaks. Immediately to the north of the
deepest part of the canyon it rises in a series of subordinate plateaus,
diversified with green meadows, marshes, bogs, ponds, forests, and grovy
park valleys, a favorite Indian hunting ground, inhabited by elk, deer,
beaver, etc. 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 l