The Crest of the Continent: A Summer's Ramble in the Rocky Mountains and Beyond

by Ernest Ingersoll

With the first full light of dawn, on the morning after leaving Grand Junction, the vigilant Madame was awake, and we heard her calling upon us from her curtained corner to wake up and look out of the window. Well, as the Shaughran said when punished for his fox-hunt on the Squire’s horse, “It was worth it,” even at the expense of the morning nap. Here was something different from anything seen before.

We were far inside the boundary of Utah Territory and were already beginning to climb the first steps toward the heights of the Wasatch—the western bulwark of the Rocky mountains. The way lay up the South Fork of the Price river, along a broad valley sunken between enormously high walls of sedimentary rock whose horizontal stratification betrayed no signs of disturbance. How long must the waters of the paleazoic sea have surged against the primitive granitic caves and lava-masses—how steady must this part of the earth’s crust have remained for ages—to let these thousands of feet of rocky tablets be piled up! And then, when it was done; when the slow upheaval had come, and the water had gradually been drawn off; how patiently did the centuries wait while these great depressed spaces were cut down and the material carried away to be spread—who knows where?

Here mountain-like table-lands stretched their white and cedar-spiked terraces, one above another to the plateau-top, for scores of miles out from the range against which they were braced. The water and the sand-blast of the fierce winds had worn their exposed cliff-faces, and sometimes carved their crests (now gold-tipped by the first sunbeams) into fantastic shapes that recalled pictures in the Dakota badlands or the grotesque monuments near Colorado Springs. In some places they were honeycombed with round holes, connecting pits and fissures, like a prodigious display of Arabesque fret-work; elsewhere they would stand massive and plain. As we proceeded colors began to appear,—yellows, warm browns and pale reds, against which, in thorough keeping, grew the bent and aged forms of junipers. In the soft gray of the morning light, nothing could be more pleasing than these worn and variegated battlements, between which for miles and miles the road winds its way. Every stupendous headland was a new rendering of the general idea—a novel design coherent with hundreds of its fellows; and of each the eye was afforded several altered aspects as the train changed its point of view.

Finally we attained a higher level, and the cliffs came nearer, became more precipitous and the inter spaces more green. This was Castle Valley. We had risen and dressed ourselves and were thinking of breakfast. The sun had come high enough over the “great, lone land” in our rear to shoot his beams half way down the projections of the dewy and glittering cliffs, when the train came to a stop, though there was only a side-track. Stepping to the platform to enquire why, we came with all the shock of complete surprise face to face with what to me, is the most inspiring, as a single object, of all the marvelous scenes between the Plains and the Salt Sea. This was Castle Gate.

The cañon here becomes very narrow and tortuous, with picturesque defiles opening here and there and conducting tiny streams, swelled in spring to noisy torrents. Trees and bushes in great abundance grow on the narrow banks of the river and swarm up the rough heaps of rocks that bury the foot of the cliff on each side. Just here, these cliffs are several hundred feet high and exceedingly steep, showing great ledge-fronts as upright and clean of vegetation as the side of a house. All the rocks are bright rust-red, darker and lighter here and there; and over all arches a sky, violet-blue, vivid, and immeasurably deep, for you may look far into it, as into water that lies quiet and luminous under the sunshine.

Now out from this wall on one side pushes a great projection half way across the valley, crowned on its point by a round turret. This is on the left or southern side. Opposite it has been left standing an enormous natural wall—a thin promontory projected from the face of the mountain as Sandy Hook stretches narrow and straight out in the ocean beyond the Atlantic coast-line. From base to combing it rises sheer and toppling whichever way you scan it; and on the western side the topmost ledges overhang. Here the face is scarred not only by the horizontal lines denoting the separate strata, but also by vertical gashes of cleavage some of which are strongly marked cracks extending from top to bottom. These show how, by the continual scaling off of enormous slabs on each side, under the prying levers of heat and cold, moisture and weight, this once thick headland has been reduced to a thinness so contracted that its thickness in proportion to its height is no greater than that of Cleopatra’s Needle or any other monumental shaft; while the narrowed peninsular, which connects it with the main crag, has only the proportions of a garden wall: but what a wall! for it is eight hundred feet from its weedy top to the foundation. You can count in the patches of freshly exposed rock on its surface how season by season it is diminishing; and one great crack almost splits its extreme edge in twain so that some day, with an earth-jarring crash, half the thickness of this noble remnant will drop to its base and burst into dust and fragments.

Heedless of such a catastrophe, and unmindful of the grandeur of their home in human eyes, birds build their nests in the crevices and crannies that are nicked into its crimson front, and bats shrink from the light into the seams that make a network upon its sides. Great gaps mar the regularity of its sky line; but these mark the ruinous hand of time and add to the antique grandeur of the pile. We cannot take our eyes from it, and forget the even more lofty walls and pinnacles opposite, which have not the advantage of the isolation, and the Olympian dignity and pose, of this daring pier.

A little group of Indians on horseback, in the full toggery of Uinta Utes, were jogging along the road beside the track when presently we emerged from Castle Valley and drew up at Pleasant Valley Junction. Here a branch road comes from some important coal mines sixteen miles to the westward. This coal occurs in a bed eleven feet in thickness, and so situated as to be worked very conveniently. The mines were opened four years ago, and a railway built to them from Provo—a distance of sixty miles. This was bought by the Denver and Rio Grande and a part of it was utilized. Now all the coal comes down from the mines by gravity, and the locomotive is required only to haul up the empty cars.

This coal is bituminous, and of better quality than that from Rock Springs, in Wyoming, which it is gradually displacing in the Utah markets, since it is found to give more heat, ton for ton. Its introduction was a boon to the people generally, for instead of seven dollars and fifty cents a ton, with occasional extra prices, they now pay only five dollars, and get a better article. The mines are operated by the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, who employ about one hundred men and produce a daily output of three hundred tons, which is constantly increasing to meet the growing demand.