Glen Canyon Wall.
About 1200 feet high. Homogeneous sandstone on top of thin bedded sandstone.
Photograph by J. FENNEMORE, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
Glen Canyon.
Sandstone wall about 1200 feet high.
Photograph by J. FENNEMORE, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
Glen Canyon, Sentinel Rock.
Between the Crossing of the Fathers and Lee’s Ferry—about 300 feet high.
Photograph by E.O. BEAMAN, U.S. Colo. Riv. Exp.
Powell prepared to go to Salt Lake, about five hundred miles away, to make preparations for our winter’s mountain work, and we all wrote letters to send out. On the 10th of October they left us, Hillers going with Powell, while we were to run down thirty-five miles farther to the mouth of the Paria, and there cache the two boats for the winter. Steward was now taken sick, and though some Navajos who came along kindly offered to carry him with them to Kanab, he preferred to stay with us, so we stretched him out, during our runs, on one of the cabins. This was not entirely comfortable for him, but the river was smooth and easy as far as the Paria, so there was no danger of spilling him off, and he got on fairly well. At the Paria, Jones, who had made a misstep in one of the boats at the Junction and injured one leg, developed inflammatory rheumatism in it, and also in the other. Andy at Millecrag Bend had put on his shoe with an unseen scorpion in it, the sting of which caused him to grow thin and pale. Bishop’s old wound troubled him; Beaman and W. C. Powell also felt “under the weather,” so that of the whole party left here, Thompson and I were the only ones who remained entirely well. Arriving at the Paria, we hid the boats for the winter, and waited for the pack-train that was to bring us provisions, and take us out to Kanab, which would be headquarters. The pack-train, however, was misled by a man who pretended to be acquainted with the trail, and we ate up all the food we had before it arrived. It came over an extraordinary path. Lost on top of the Paria Plateau, it was only able to reach us by the discovery of a singular old trail coming down the two-thousand-foot cliffs three miles up the Paria. While waiting we had examined the immediate neighbourhood and had climbed to the summit of some sandstone peaks on the left, where the wall of Glen Canyon breaks away to the southward. The view was superb. Mountains, solid and solitary, rose up here and there, and lines of cliffs, strangely coloured, stretched everywhere across the wide horizon, while from our feet, like a veritable huge writhing dragon, Marble Canyon zigzagged its long, dark line into the blue distance, its narrow tributaries looking like the monster’s many legs. I took it into my head to try to shoot from there into the water of Glen Canyon beneath us, and borrowed Bishop’s 44-calibre Remington revolver for the purpose. When I pulled the trigger I was positively startled by the violence of the report, a deafening shock like a thousand thunder-claps in one; then dead silence. Next, from far away there was a rattle as of musketry, and peal after peal of the echoing shot came back to us. The interval of silence was timed on another trial and was found to be exactly twenty seconds.[[2]] The result was always the same, and from this unusual echo we named the place Echo Peaks.
[2] Should be twenty-four seconds.