Beautiful as are the plains, the transition to the limitless park-like
forests of the Kaibab is a welcome delight. Kaibab is a Piute Indian
word meaning “Mountain-lying-down,” a description that fits it well. It
is actually a vast plateau, some fifty miles long and thirty-five miles
wide, and containing 500 square miles of yellow pine, fir and spruce
diversified by charming aspen copses, the largest and most beautiful
virgin forest in the United States. In elevation it rises from 7,500 to
9,300 feet above sea level.
Kaibab Forest occupies the top of a lofty plateau isolated on the south
and east by the Grand Canyon, on the north and west by the mysterious
plains above which it rises 5,000 feet. On all sides are unexplored
plateaus and canyons where untouched cliff dwellings stand. Beneath its
stately trees the grassy forest floor is free from underbrush and fallen
timber, as clean as if raked daily by ten thousand foresters; and,
although they are not widely distributed, there are many lovely wild
flowers and ferns. Scattered throughout its great extent are spacious
“parks,” green-swarded, treeless open spaces bordered by white-boled,
quivering aspens, the advancing light cavalry of an innumerable army of
deploying pines. The witchery of these sylvan plaisances is wholly
irresistible; they seem designed for parades and pageants, for the
light-hearted moods of man and beast.
And so, indeed, they are employed. Afternoon and morning they are the
gathering places of many of the 30,000 black-tail mule deer that range
unfrightened through the forest. They do not require patient stalking to
be seen; crossing the forest one may usually count several hundred
haughty bucks, solicitous does, and adorable prancing fawns of exquisite
grace. Their only enemies are the cougars, much reduced in number by
“Uncle” Jimmy Owens, the government hunter who was Roosevelt’s guide,
and other official huntsmen. Second in interest of the Kaibab’s
creatures is the white-tailed squirrel (_Sciurus Kaibabensis_) which may
ordinarily be seen flickering through the forest near Jacobs Lake Ranger
Station. This is the most beautiful squirrel in the Western Hemisphere,
and one of the rarest, for it lives nowhere else. It is about the size
of a large gray squirrel, though shorter and stockier, is dark bluish
gray marked with brown, has long tufted ears and a broad feathery tail
that is almost pure white. Cougars and mountain sheep are rarely seen by
the ordinary traveler. Captain Dutton wrote of a visit to the Kaibab in
1880: “It is difficult to say precisely wherein the charm of the sylvan
scenery of the Kaibab consists. We, who through successive summers have
wandered through its forests and parks, have come to regard it as the
most enchanting region it has been our privilege to visit.
“There is a constant succession of parks and glades--dreamy avenues of
grass and flowers winding between sylvan walls, or spreading out in
broad open meadows.... The balmy air, the dark and sombre spruces, the
pale-green aspens, the golden shafts of sunshine shot through their
foliage, the velvet sward--surely this is the home of the woodland
nymphs.”
[Illustration: _The Filigreed Walls of Bryce Canyon_]