It was a single gigantic ridge which
we had passed through, standing up knifelike, built up entirely
of great brick-shaped masses of bright red rock, some of them as
large as the Royal Institution, Edinburgh, piled one on another
by Titans.
Pitch pines grew out of their crevices, but there
was not a vestige of soil. Beyond, wall beyond wall of similar
construction, and range above range, rose into the blue sky.
Fifteen miles more over great ridges, along passes dark with
shadow, and so narrow that we had to ride in the beds of the
streams which had excavated them, round the bases of colossal
pyramids of rock crested with pines, up into fair upland "parks,"
scarlet in patches with the poison oak, parks so beautifully
arranged by nature that I momentarily expected to come upon some
stately mansion, but that afternoon crested blue jays and
chipmunks had them all to themselves. Here, in the early
morning, deer, bighorn, and the stately elk, come down to feed,
and there, in the night, prowl and growl the Rocky Mountain lion,
the grizzly bear, and the cowardly wolf. There were chasms of
immense depth, dark with the indigo gloom of pines, and mountains
with snow gleaming on their splintered crests, loveliness to
bewilder and grandeur to awe, and still streams and shady pools,
and cool depths of shadow; mountains again, dense with pines,
among which patches of aspen gleamed like gold; valleys
where the yellow cotton-wood mingled with the crimson oak, and
so, on and on through the lengthening shadows, till the trail,
which in places had been hardly legible, became well defined, and
we entered a long gulch with broad swellings of grass belted with
pines.
A very pretty mare, hobbled, was feeding; a collie dog barked at
us, and among the scrub, not far from the track, there was a
rude, black log cabin, as rough as it could be to be a shelter at
all, with smoke coming out of the roof and window.
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