way; acres of polished mottled rock tilted at angles which defy
crossing; unexpected canyons whose deep, broken, red and yellow
precipices force long detours.
And everywhere color, color, color. It pervades the glowing floor, the
uprising edifices. The very air palpitates with color, insistent,
irresistible, indefinable.
This is the setting of the Rainbow Bridge.
Scarcely more than a hundred persons besides Indians, they tell me, have
seen this most entrancing spectacle, perhaps, of all America. The way in
is long and difficult. There are only two or three who know it, even of
those who have been there more than once, and the region has no
inhabitants to point directions among the confusing rocks. There is no
water, nor any friendly tree.
[Illustration: ROOSEVELT PARTY IN MONUMENT VALLEY]
[Illustration: RAINBOW BRIDGE IN FULL PERSPECTIVE]
The day's ride is wearying in the extreme in spite of its fascinations.
The objective is Navajo Mountain, which, strange spectacle in this
desert waste, is forested to its summit with yellow pine above a
surrounding belt of juniper and pinyon, with aspen and willows, wild
roses, Indian paint-brush, primrose, and clematis in its lower valleys.
Below, the multicolored desert, deep cut with the canyons which carry
off the many little rivers.
Down one of these wild and highly colored desert canyons among whose
vivid tumbled rocks your horses pick their course with difficulty, you
suddenly see a rainbow caught among the vivid bald rocks, a slender arch
so deliciously proportioned, so gracefully curved among its sharp
surroundings, that your eye fixes it steadfastly and your heart bounds
with relief; until now you had not noticed the oppression of this
angled, spine-carpeted landscape.
From now on nothing else possesses you. The eccentricity of the going
constantly hides it, and each reappearance brings again the joy of
discovery. And at last you reach it, dismount beside the small clear
stream which flows beneath it, approach reverently, overwhelmed with a
strange mingling of awe and great elation. You stand beneath its
enormous encircling red and yellow arch and perceive that it is the
support which holds up the sky. It is long before turbulent emotion
permits the mind to analyze the elements which compose its extraordinary
beauty.
Dimensions mean little before spectacles like this. To know that the
span is two hundred and seventy-eight feet may help realization at home,
where it may be laid out, staked and looked at; it exceeds a block of
Fifth Avenue in New York. To know that the apex of the rainbow's curve
is three hundred and nine feet above your wondering eyes means nothing
to you there; but to those who know New York City it means the height of
the Flatiron Building built three stories higher. Choose a building of
equal height in your own city, stand beside it and look up. Then imagine
it a gigantic monolithic arch of entrancing proportions and fascinating
curve, glowing in reds and yellows which merge into each other
insensibly and without form or pattern. Imagine this fairy unreality
outlined, not against the murk which overlies cities, but against a sky
of desert clarity and color.
All natural bridges are created wholly by erosion. This was carved from
an outstanding spur of Navajo sandstone which lay crosswise of the
canyon. Originally the stream struck full against this barrier, swung
sideways, and found its way around the spur's free outer edge. The end
was merely a matter of time. Gradually but surely the stream, sand-laden
in times of flood, wore an ever-deepening hollow in the barrier. Finally
it wore it through and passed under what then became a bridge. But
meantime other agencies were at work. The rocky wall above, alternately
hot and cold, as happens in high arid lands, detached curved, flattened
plates. Worn below by the stream, thinned above by the destructive
processes of wind and temperature, the window enlarged. In time the
Rainbow Bridge evolved in all its glorious beauty. Not far away is
another natural bridge well advanced in the making.
The Rainbow Bridge was discovered in 1909 by William Boone Douglass,
Examiner of Surveys in the General Land Office, Santa Fe. Following is
an abstract of the government report covering the discovery:
"The information had come to Mr. Douglass from a Paiute Indian, Mike's
Boy, who later took the name of Jim, employed as flagman in the survey
of the three great natural bridges of White Canyon. Seeing the white
man's appreciation of this form of wind and water erosion, Jim told of a
greater bridge known only to himself and one other Indian, located on
the north side of the Navajo Mountain, in the Paiute Indian reservation.
Bending a twig of willow in rainbow-shape, with its ends stuck in the
ground, Jim showed what his bridge looked like.
"An effort was made to reach the bridge in December. Unfortunately Jim
could not be located. On reaching the Navajo trading-post, Oljato,
nothing was known of such a bridge, and the truth of Jim's statement was
questioned.
"The trip was abandoned until August of the following year, when Mr.
Douglass organized a second party at Bluff, Utah, and under Jim's
guidance, left for the bridge. At Oljato the party was augmented by
Professor Cummings, and a party of college students, with John Wetherill
as packer, who were excavating ruins in the Navajo Indian Reservation.
As the uninhabited and unknown country of the bridge was reached,
travel became almost impossible. All equipment, save what was absolutely
indispensable, was discarded. The whole country was a maze of box
canyons, as though some turbulent sea had suddenly solidified in rock.
Only at a few favored points could the canyon walls be scaled even by
man, and still fewer where a horse might clamber. In the sloping
sandstone ledges footholds for the horses must be cut, and even then
they fell, until their loss seemed certain. After many adventures the
party arrived at 11 o'clock, A.M., August 14, 1909.
"Jim had indeed made good. Silhouetted against a turquoise sky was an
arch of rainbow shape, so delicately proportioned that it seemed as if
some great sculptor had hewn it from the rock. Its span of 270 feet
bridged a stream of clear, sparkling water, that flowed 310 feet below
its crest. The world's greatest natural bridge had been found as Jim had
described it. Beneath it, an ancient altar bore witness to the fact that
it was a sacred shrine of those archaic people, the builders of the
weird and mysterious cliff-castles seen in the Navajo National Monument.
"The crest of the bridge was reached by Mr. Douglass and his three
assistants, John R. English, Jean F. Rogerson, and Daniel Perkins, by
lowering themselves with ropes to the south abutment, and climbing its
arch. Probably they were the first human beings to reach it.
"No Indian name for the bridge was known, except such descriptive
generic terms as the Paiute 'The space under a horse's belly between its
fore and hind legs,' or the 'Hole in the rock' (nonnezoshi) of the
Navajo, neither of which was deemed appropriate. While the question of a
name was still being debated, there appeared in the sky, as if in
answer, a beautiful rainbow, the 'Barahoni' of the Paiutes.
"The suitability of the name was further demonstrated by a superstition
of the Navajos. On the occasion of his second visit, the fall of the
same year, Mr. Douglass had as an assistant an old Navajo Indian named
White Horse, who, after passing under the bridge, would not return, but
climbed laboriously around its end. On being pressed for an explanation,
he would arch his hand, and through it squint at the sun, solemnly
shaking his head. Later, through the assistance of Mrs. John Wetherill,
an experienced Navajo linguist, Mr. Douglass learned that the formations
of the type of the bridge were symbolic rainbows, or the sun's path, and
one passing under could not return, under penalty of death, without the
utterance of a certain prayer, which White Horse had forgotten. The aged
Navajo informant would not reveal the prayer for fear of the 'Lightning
Snake.'"
If your return from Rainbow Bridge carries you through Monument Valley
with its miles of blazing red structures, memory will file still another
amazing sensation. Some of its crimson monsters rise a thousand feet
above the grassy plain.
NATURAL BRIDGES NATIONAL MONUMENT
Not many miles north of the Rainbow Bridge, fifty miles from Monticello
in southern Utah, in a region not greatly dissimilar in outline, and
only less colorful, three natural bridges of large size have been
conserved under the title of the Natural Bridges National Monument.
Here, west of the Mesa Verde, the country is characterized by long,
broad mesas, sometimes crowned with stunted cedar forests, dropping
suddenly into deep valleys. The erosion of many thousands of centuries
has ploughed the surface into winding rock-strewn canyons, great and
small. Three of these canyons are crossed by bridges stream-cut through
the solid rock.
The largest, locally known as the Augusta Bridge, is named Sipapu, Gate
of Heaven. It is one of the largest natural bridges in the world,
measuring two hundred and twenty-two feet in height, with a span of two
hundred and sixty-one feet. It is a graceful and majestic structure, so
proportioned and finished that it is difficult, from some points of
view, to believe it the unplanned work of natural forces. One crosses it
on a level platform twenty-eight feet wide.
The other two, which are nearly its size, are found within five miles.
The Kachina, which means Guardian Spirit, is locally called the Caroline
Bridge. The Owachomo, meaning Rock Mound, is locally known as the Edwin
Bridge. The local names celebrate persons who visited them soon after
they were first discovered by Emery Knowles in 1895.
They may be reached by horse and pack-train from Monticello, or Bluff,
Utah. One of the five sections of the reservation conserves two large
caves.
DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT
The Age of Reptile developed a wide variety of monsters in the central
regions of the continent from Montana to the Gulf of Mexico. The
dinosaurs of the Triassic and Jurassic periods sometimes had gigantic
size, the Brontosaurus attaining a length of sixty feet or more. The
femur of the Brachiosaurus exceeded six feet; this must have been the
greatest of them all.
The greater dinosaurs were herbivorous. The carnivorous species were not
remarkable for size; there were small leaping forms scarcely larger than
rabbits. The necessity for defense against the flesh-eaters developed,
in the smaller dinosaurs, extremely heavy armor. The stegosaur carried
huge plates upon his curved back, suggesting a circular saw; his long
powerful tail was armed with sharp spikes, and must have been a
dangerous weapon. Dinosaurs roamed all over what is now called our
middle west.
In those days the central part of our land was warm and swampy.
Fresh-water lagoons and sluggish streams were bordered by low forests of
palms and ferns; one must go to the tropics to find a corresponding
landscape in our times. The waters abounded in reptiles and fish. Huge
winged reptiles flew from cover to cover. The first birds were evolving
from reptilian forms.
The absorbing story of these times is written in the rocks. The life
forms were at their full when the sands were laid which to-day is the
wide-spread layer of sandstone which geologists call the Morrison
formation. Erosion has exposed this sandstone in several parts of the
western United States, and many have been the interesting glimpses it
has afforded of that strange period so many millions of years ago.
In the Uintah Basin of northwestern Utah, a region of bad lands crossed
by the Green River on its way to the Colorado and the Grand Canyon, the
Morrison strata have been bent upward at an angle of sixty degrees or
more and then cut through, exposing their entire depth. The country is
extremely rough and bare. Only in occasional widely separated bottoms
has irrigation made farming possible; elsewhere nothing grows upon the
bald hillsides.
Here, eighteen miles east of the town of Vernal, eighty acres of the
exposed Morrison strata were set aside in 1915 as the Dinosaur National
Monument. These acres have already yielded a very large collection of
skeletons. Since 1908 the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh has been
gathering specimens of the greatest importance. The only complete
skeleton of a dinosaur ever found was taken out in 1909. The work of
quarrying and removal is done with the utmost care. The rock is
chiselled away in thin layers, as no one can tell when an invaluable
relic may be found. As fast as bones are detached, they are covered with
plaster of Paris and so wrapped that breakage becomes impossible. Two
years were required to unearth the skeleton of a brontosaurus.
The extraordinary massing of fossil remains at this point suggests that
floods may have swept these animals from a large area and lodged their
bodies here, where they were covered with sands. But it also is possible
that this spot was merely a favorite feeding-ground. It may be that
similarly rich deposits lie hidden in many places in the wide-spread
Morrison sandstone which some day may be unearthed. The bones of
dinosaurs have been found in the Morrison of Colorado near Boulder.
PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL MONUMENT
For a hundred and twenty-five or thirty miles southwest of the Grand
Canyon, the valley of the Little Colorado River is known as the Painted
Desert. It is a narrow plain of Carboniferous and Triassic marls,
shales, sandstones, and conglomerates, abounding in fossils, the most
arid part of Arizona; even the river's lower reaches dry up for a part
of each year. But it is a palette of brilliant colors; it will be
difficult to name a tint or shade which is not vividly represented in
this gaudy floor and in the strata of the cliffs which define its
northern and eastern limits. Above and beyond these cliffs lies that
other amazing desert, the Navajo country, the land of the Rainbow Bridge
and the Canyon de Chelly.
I have mentioned the Painted Desert because it is shaped like a long
narrow finger pointed straight at the Petrified Forests lying just
beyond its touch. Here the country is also highly colored, but very
differently. Maroon and tawny yellow are the prevailing tints of the
marls, red and brown the colors of the sandstones. There is a rolling
sandy floor crisscrossed with canyons in whose bottoms grow stunted
cedars and occasional cottonwoods. Upon this floor thousands of
petrified logs are heaped in confusion. In many places the strong
suggestion is that of a log jam left stranded by subsiding floods.
Nearly all the logs have broken into short lengths as cleanly cut as if
sawn, the result of succeeding heat and cold.
Areas of petrified wood are common in many parts of the Navajo country
and its surrounding deserts. The larger areas are marked on the
Geological Survey maps, and many lesser areas are mentioned in reports.
There are references to rooted stumps. The three groups in the Petrified
Forest National Monument, near the town of Adamana, Arizona, were chosen
for conservation because they are the largest and perhaps the finest; at
the time, the gorgeously colored logs were being carried away in
quantities to be cut up into table-tops.
As a matter of fact, these are not forests. Most of these trees grew
upon levels seven hundred feet or more higher than where they now lie
and at unknown distances; floods left them here.
[Illustration: THE PETRIFIED FOREST OF ARIZONA
Showing the formation in colored strata. The logs seen on the ground
grew upon a level seven hundred feet higher]
[Illustration: PETRIFIED TRUNK FORMING A BRIDGE OVER A CANYON
The trunk is 111 feet long. The stone piers were built to preserve it]
The First Forest, which lies six miles south of Adamana, contains
thousands of broken lengths. One unbroken log a hundred and eleven feet
long bridges a canyon forty-five feet wide, a remarkable spectacle. In
the Second Forest, which lies two miles and a half south of that, and
the Third Forest, which is thirteen miles south of Adamana and eighteen
miles southeast of Holbrook, most of the trunks appear to lie in their
original positions. One which was measured by Doctor G.H. Knowlton of
the Smithsonian Institution was more than seven feet in diameter and a
hundred and twenty feet long. He estimates the average diameters at
three or four feet, while lengths vary from sixty to a hundred feet.
The coloring of the wood is variegated and brilliant. "The state of
mineralization in which most of this wood exists," writes Professor
Lester F. Ward, paleobotanist, "almost places them among the gems or
precious stones. Not only are chalcedony, opals, and agates found among
them, but many approach the condition of jasper and onyx." "The
chemistry of the process of petrifaction or silicification," writes
Doctor George P. Merrill, Curator of Geology in the National Museum, "is
not quite clear. Silica is ordinarily looked upon as one of the most
insoluble of substances. It is nevertheless readily soluble in alkaline
solutions--_i.e._, solutions containing soda or potash. It is probable
that the solutions permeating these buried logs were thus alkaline, and
as the logs gradually decayed their organic matter was replaced,
molecule by molecule, by silica. The brilliant red and other colors are
due to the small amount of iron and manganese deposited together with
the silica, and super-oxydized as the trunks are exposed to the air.
The most brilliant colors are therefore to be found on the surface."
The trees are of several species. All those identified by Doctor
Knowlton were Araucaria, which do not now live in the northern
hemisphere. Doctor E.C. Jeffrey, of Harvard, has described one genus
unknown elsewhere.
To get the Petrified Forest into full prospective it is well to recall
that these shales and sands were laid in water, above whose surface the
land raised many times, only to sink again and accumulate new strata.
The plateau now has fifty-seven hundred feet of altitude.
"When it is known," writes Doctor Knowlton, "that since the close of
Triassic times probably more than fifty thousand feet of sediments have
been deposited, it is seen that the age of the Triassic forests of
Arizona can only be reckoned in millions of years--just how many it
would be mere speculation to attempt to estimate. It is certain, also,
that at one time the strata containing these petrified logs were
themselves buried beneath thousands of feet of strata of later ages,
which have in places been worn away sufficiently to expose the
tree-bearing beds. Undoubtedly other forests as great or greater than
those now exposed lie buried beneath the later formations."
A very interesting small forest, not in the reservation, lies nine miles
north of Adamana.
PAPAGO SAGUARO NATIONAL MONUMENT
The popular idea of a desert of dry drifting sand unrelieved except at
occasional oases by evidences of life was born of our early geographies,
which pictured the Sahara as the desert type. Far different indeed is
our American desert, most of which has a few inches of rainfall in the
early spring and grows a peculiar flora of remarkable individuality and
beauty. The creosote bush seen from the car-windows shelters a few
grasses which brown and die by summer, but help to color the landscape
the year around. Many low flowering plants gladden the desert
springtime, and in the far south and particularly in the far southwest
are several varieties of cactus which attain great size. The frequenter
of the desert soon correlates its flora with its other scenic elements
and finds all rich and beautiful.
In southwestern Arizona and along the southern border of California this
strange flora finds its fullest expression. Here one enters a new
fairy-land, a region of stinging bushes and upstanding monsters lifting
ungainly arms to heaven. In 1914, to conserve one of the many rich
tracts of desert flora, President Wilson created the Papago Saguaro
National Monument a few miles east of Phoenix, Arizona. Its two thousand
and fifty acres include fine examples of innumerable desert species in
fullest development.
Among these the cholla is at once one of the most fascinating and the
most exasperating. It belongs to the prickly pear family, but there
resemblance ceases. It is a stocky bush two or three feet high covered
with balls of flattened powerful sharp-pointed needles which will
penetrate even a heavy shoe. In November these fall, strewing the ground
with spiny indestructible weapons. There are many varieties of chollas
and all are decorative. The tree cholla grows from seven to ten feet in
height, a splendid showy feature of the desert slopes, and the home,
fortress, and sure defense for all the birds who can find nest-room
behind its bristling breastwork.
The Cereus thurberi, the pipe-organ, or candelabrum cactus, as it is
variously called, grows in thick straight columns often clumped closely
together, a picturesque and beautiful creation. Groups range from a few
inches to many feet in height. One clump of twenty-two stems has been
reported, the largest stem of which was twenty feet high and twenty-two
inches in diameter.
Another of picturesque appeal is the bisnaga or barrel cactus, of which
there are many species of many sizes. Like all cacti, it absorbs water
during the brief wet season and stores it for future use. A specimen the
size of a flour-barrel can be made to yield a couple of gallons of
sweetish but refreshing water, whereby many a life has been saved in the
sandy wastes.
But the desert's chief exhibit is the giant saguaro, the Cereus
giganteus, from which the reservation got its name. This stately cactus
rises in a splendid green column, accordion-plaited and decorated with
star-like clusters of spines upon the edges of the plaits. The larger
specimens grow as high as sixty or seventy feet and throw out at
intervals powerful branches which bend sharply upward; sometimes there
are as many as eight or nine of these gigantic branches.
No towering fir or spreading oak carries a more princely air. A forest
of giant saguaro rising from a painted desert far above the tangle of
creosote-bush, mesquite, cholla, bisnaga, and scores of other strange
growths of a land of strange attractions is a spectacle to stir the
blood and to remember for a lifetime.
COLORADO NATIONAL MONUMENT
On the desert border of far-western Colorado near Grand Junction is a
region of red sandstone which the erosion of the ages has carved into
innumerable strange and grotesque shapes. Once a great plain, then a
group of mesas, now it has become a city of grotesque monuments. Those
who have seen the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs can imagine
it multiplied many times in size, grotesqueness, complexity, and area;
such a vision will approximate the Colorado National Monument. The two
regions have other relations in common, for as the Garden of the Gods
flanks the Rockies' eastern slopes and looks eastward to the great
plains, so does the Colorado National Monument flank the Rockies'
western desert. Both are the disclosure by erosion of similar strata of
red sandstone which may have been more or less continuous before the
great Rockies wrinkled, lifted, and burst upward between them.
The rock monuments of this group are extremely highly colored. They rise
in several neighboring canyons and some of them are of great height and
fantastic design. One is a nearly circular column with a diameter of a
hundred feet at the base and a height of more than four hundred feet.
Caves add to the attractions, and there are many springs among the
tangled growths of the canyon floors. There are cedars and pinyon trees.
The region abounds in mule-deer and other wild animals.
CAPULIN MOUNTAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT