The Golden Eagle May Be
Seen, And The Osprey, Hawks, Jays, Hummingbirds, The Mourning Dove,
And Cheery Familiar Singers - The Black-Headed Grosbeak, Robin,
Bluebird, Townsend's Thrush, And Many Warblers, Sailing The Sky And
Enlivening The Rocks And Bushes Through All The Canyon Wilderness.
Here at Hance's river camp or a few miles above it brave Powell and
his brave men passed their first night in the canyon on the
adventurous voyage of discovery thirty-three[34] years ago.
They
faced a thousand dangers, open or hidden, now in their boats gladly
sliding down swift, smooth reaches, now rolled over and over in back-combing surges of rough, roaring cataracts, sucked under in eddies,
swimming like beavers, tossed and beaten like castaway drift - stout-hearted, undaunted, doing their work through it all. After a month of
this they floated smoothly out of the dark, gloomy, roaring abyss into
light and safety two hundred miles below. As the flood rushes past
us, heavy-laden with desert mud, we naturally think of its sources,
its countless silvery branches outspread on thousands of snowy
mountains along the crest of the continent, and the life of the, the
beauty of the, their history and romance. Its topmost springs are far
north and east in Wyoming and Colorado, on the snowy Wind River,
Front, Park, and Sawatch Ranges, dividing the two ocean waters, and
the Elk, Wahsatch, Uinta, and innumerable 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.
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