From here we rode down the valley to our third camp, at Tower Falls,
stopping on the way to eat our luncheon on a washed boulder beside a
creek. On this ride I saw my first and only badger; he stuck his
striped head out of his hole in the ground only a few yards away from
us as we passed.
Our camp at Tower Falls was amid the spruces above a canyon of the
Yellowstone, five or six hundred feet deep. It was a beautiful and
impressive situation,--shelter, snugness, even cosiness,--looking over
the brink of the awful and the terrifying. With a run and a jump I
think one might have landed in the river at the bottom of the great
abyss, and in doing so might have scaled one of those natural obelisks
or needles of rock that stand up out of the depths two or three
hundred feet high. Nature shows you what an enormous furrow her plough
can open through the strata when mowing horizontally, at the same time
that she shows you what delicate and graceful columns her slower and
gentler aerial forces can carve out of the piled strata. At the Falls
there were two or three of these columns, like the picket-pins of the
elder gods.