Steep Trails Part 14

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 creva.s.ses of glaciers--blackened with lava flows, dotted with volcanoes and beautiful b.u.t.tes, 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.

Walking quietly about in the alleys and byways of the Grand Canyon city, we learn something of the way it was made; and all must admire effects so great from means apparently so simple; rain striking light hammer blows or heavier in streams, with many rest Sundays; soft air and light, gentle sappers and miners, toiling forever; the big river sawing the plateau asunder, carrying away the eroded and ground waste, and exposing the edges of the strata to the weather; rain torrents sawing cross-streets and alleys, exposing the strata in the same way in hundreds of sections, the softer, less resisting beds weathering and receding faster, thus undermining the harder beds, which fall, not only in small weathered particles, but in heavy sheer-cleaving ma.s.ses, a.s.sisted down from time to time by kindly earthquakes, rain torrents rus.h.i.+ng the fallen material to the river, keeping the wall rocks constantly exposed. Thus the canyon grows wider and deeper. So also do the side canyons and amphitheaters, while secondary gorges and cirques gradually isolate ma.s.ses of the promontories, forming new buildings, all of which are being weathered and pulled and shaken down while being built, showing destruction and creation as one. We see the proudest temples and palaces in stateliest att.i.tudes, wearing their sheets of detritus as royal robes, shedding off showers of red and yellow stones like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of angels the natural beauty of death.

Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of sediments,--sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled with the remains of animals,--and every particle of the sandstones and limestones of these wonderful structures to be derived from other landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, b.u.t.tes, and other monumental ma.s.ses of the plateau on either side of the canyon, we discover that an amount of material has been carried off in the general denudation of the region compared with which even that carried away in the making of the Grand Canyon is as nothing. Thus each wonder in sight becomes a window through which other wonders come to view. In no other part of this continent are the wonders of geology, the records of the world's auld lang syne, more widely opened, or displayed in higher piles. The whole canyon is a mine of fossils, in which five thousand feet of horizontal strata are exposed in regular succession over more than a thousand square miles of wall-s.p.a.ce, and on the adjacent plateau region there is another series of beds twice as thick, forming a grand geological library--a collection of stone books covering thousands of miles of shelving, tier on tier, conveniently arranged for the student.

And with what wonderful scriptures are their pages filled--myriad forms of successive floras and faunas, lavishly ill.u.s.trated with colored drawings, carrying us back into the midst of the life of a past infinitely remote. And as we go on and on, studying this old, old life in the light of the life beating warmly about us, we enrich and lengthen our own.

THE END

Footnotes:

[by the editor of the 1918 original of this text]:

[Footnote 1: This essay was written early in 1875.]

[Footnote 2: The wild sheep of California are now cla.s.sified as Ovis nelsoni. Whether those of the Shasta region belonged to the latter species, or to the bighorn species of Oregon, Idaho, and Was.h.i.+ngton, is still an unsettled question.]

[Footnote 3: An excerpt from a letter to a friend, written in 1872.]

[Footnote 4: Muir at this time was making Yosemite Valley his home.]

[Footnote 5: An obsolete genus of plants now replaced in the main by Chrysothamnus and Ericameria.]

[Footnote 6: An early local name for what is now known as La.s.sen Peak, or Mt. La.s.sen. In 1914 its volcanic activity was resumed with spectacular eruptions of ashes, steam, and gas.]

[Footnote 7: p.r.o.nounced Too'-lay.]

[Footnote 8: Letter dated "Salt Lake City, Utah, May 15, 1877."]

[Footnote 9: Letter dated "Salt Lake City, Utah, May 19, 1877."]

[Footnote 10: Letter dated "Lake Point, Utah, May 20, 1877."]

[Footnote 11: Letter dated "Salt Lake, July, 1877."]

[Footnote 12: Letter dated "September 1, 1877."]

[Footnote 13: Letter written during the first week of September, 1877. ]

[Footnote 14: The spruce, or hemlock, then known as Abies Douglasii var.

macrocarpa is now called Pseudotsuga macrocarpa.]

[Footnote 15: Written at Ward, Nevada, in September, 1878.]

[Footnote 16: See footnote 5.]

[Footnote 17: Written at Eureka, Nevada, in October, 1878.]

[Footnote 18: Now called Pinus monophylla, or one-leaf pinyon.]

[Footnote 19: Written at Pioche, Nevada, in October, 1878.]

[Footnote 20: Written at Eureka, Nevada, in November, 1878.]

[Footnote 21: Date and place of writing not given. Published in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, January 15, 1879.]

[Footnote 22: November 11, 1889; Muir's description probably was written toward the end of the same year.]

[Footnote 23: This tree, now known to botanists as Picea sitchensis, was named Abies Menziesii by Lindley in 1833.]

[Footnote 24: Also known as "canoe cedar," and described in Jepson's Silva of California under the more recent specific name Thuja plicata. ]

[Footnote 25: Now cla.s.sified as Tsuga mertensiana Sarg.]

[Footnote 26: Now Abies grandis Lindley.]

[Footnote 27: Chamaecyparis lawsoniana Parl. (Port Orford cedar) in Jepson's Silva.]

[Footnote 28: 1889.]

[Footnote 29: A careful re-determination of the height of Rainier, made by Professor A. G. McAdie in 1905, gave an alt.i.tude of 14,394 feet. The Standard Dictionary wrongly describes it is "the highest peak (14,363 feet) within the United States." The United States Baedeker and railroad literature overstate its alt.i.tude by more than a hundred feet.]

[Footnote 30: Doubtless the red silver fir, now cla.s.sified as Abies amabilis. ]

[Footnote 31: La.s.sen Peak on recent maps.]

[Footnote 32: Pseudotsuga taxifolia Brit.]

[Footnote 33: Thuja plicata Don.]

[Footnote 34: Muir wrote this description in 1902; Major J. W. Powell made his descent through the canyon, with small boats, in 1869.]

Note from the transcriber:

A phrase Muir uses that readers might doubt: "fountain range," by which he means a mountainous area where rain or snow fall that is the source of water for a river or stream downslope. So it is not a typographical error for "mountain range"! Another odd phrase is "(something) is well worthy (something else)" rather than "well worth" or "well worthy of."

He uses this at least twice in this work.--jg