The next point of interest on the way to Salt Lake is Glenwood Springs, situated at the junction of Grand and Roaring Fork Rivers. This place derives its importance from its numerous thermal springs of great remedial virtues, and the beautiful adornments which a lavish but well-directed use of money has provided. The situation, too, is one of great natural picturesqueness, as the scenery rivals that about Manitou. Glenwood Springs is located at the head of Grand River Cañon, which extends a distance of sixteen miles through colossal mountains, the palisades of which rise in serried ranks and terminate in towering columns and gigantic turrets frequently 2,000 feet above the bed of the river. It is through this tremendous chasm that the railroad runs, so that travelers have a perfect view of the Titanic scenery from the car windows, as they are whirled through it. Three miles from Glenwood Springs is No Name Cañon, while further up the stream is a tremendous fissure which admits the river, and on account of its wildly savage appearance is called Grizzly Cañon. Ten miles more towards the river’s source is Dead Horse Cañon, which may be gained only at the expense of most laborious effort, for the trail is over great bowlders and along crumbling walls which frown far above the roaring waters below. But away up in this darksome retreat of nature, where the lion and bear have their haunts, is Meteor Falls, that leaps almost out of the mouth of the cañon and hurls its waters down a precipice nearly one hundred feet deep, and then spreads through crevices of the rocks into a score of separate streams. Not far distant is Alexander’s Cave, which, though not so well known, is much grander in size and more curious with stalactite formations than those near Manitou, which have an undeserved fame. From the summit of a mountain just east of Glenwood, and reached by a walk of three miles, an immense expanse of charming scenery is viewable. For seventy miles towards the east extends the snow-crowned chain of the Continental Divide, while towards the north, like a babe sleeping to the lullabys of a brooklet’s voice, lies the White River plateau. Southward the observer’s vision swings across the valleys of Roaring Fork and Crystal River to the Elk range, and then sweeps around to the west, where it lingers on Book Cliffs, ninety miles away, which gleam with scintillant beauty, and inspire with a grandeur that fills the very soul with wondering ecstasy.
BOOK CLIFFS, WALLS OF GRAND RIVER CAÑON.—It would be a difficult thing to find a more beautiful picture than the one that embellishes this page. It is gloriously beautiful. The camera has done its work so well that the very reflection of the sun’s rays and the soft glimmer of the summer air are shown as perfectly as they could be seen with the natural eye. In fact it has been said, and truly so, that the camera is a good detective, for it discovers objects which are invisible to ordinary human sight, and prints them indelibly upon its sensitive plates. Hence good photographs, like those in Glimpses of America, are in many respects more desirable than a visit to the scenes themselves.
THE GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO.
TRIPLE FALLS, CASCADE CAÑON.
The tumultuous anarchism of nature, the wild riot of natural forces, the savage disarrangement, the chaotically indefinable throes of internal madness that characterize the region, suggests other wonders of eruption and erosion, the dissolution and disorganization which have been wrought along the water-course and which has gnawed its way through these everlasting—nay, it would appear, transitory—mountains. The first travelers that fought their way into these vastnesses of cañon, roaring peak and soughing forests, carried back to civilization wondrous tales of the things which they had seen, and though discredited as the conceptions of perfervid imaginations, others were stimulated to seek the proofs, and confirm the theories that were offered by adventurous gold-hunters. The Government itself, unconscious of its own possessions, joined in the search for the wondrous evidences and sent expeditions into the Rocky Mountain regions to make topographic and geologic investigations, the results of which were to increase surprise. Operations in the west, chiefly against the Mohave Indians, made it necessary also for the Government to ascertain the most convenient routes for the transportation of supplies to the military posts in New Mexico and Utah, and in this search the Colorado River became an object of special interest, because if navigable it presented the easiest way to the seat of war. In order to determine the question, an expedition was despatched by the Secretary of War, in 1858, under the command of Lieutenant J. C. Ives, chief of topographical engineers. An iron steamboat fifty feet long was built in Philadelphia, which, being in sections convenient for transportation, was shipped by way of Panama to the Gulf of California, and put into service at Fort Yuma, at the mouth of the Colorado River, for an ascent of that stream.
The expedition thus conducted by Lieutenant Ives resulted in the exploration of a large territory which was before his advent therein a terra incognita, except that it had been partially traversed in 1540 by a few Spanish explorers, acting under orders of the Viceroy of New Spain, whose reports, however, were so crude as to be almost valueless. Ives succeeded in ascending the Colorado a distance of 425 miles in his steamboat, which he concluded was within seventy-five miles of the head of navigation during the most favorable season. The practical results were not of very great value, but his reports were extremely interesting, chiefly for the descriptions of marvelous scenery which they contained. Or, as he writes, “The region explored after leaving the navigable portion of the Colorado—though, in a scientific point of view, of the highest interest, and presenting natural features whose strange sublimity is perhaps unparalleled in any part of the world—is not of much value.”