About forty miles north of Salt Lake City, and on the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad, are two remarkable chasms known as Echo and Weber Cañons, which are not only sublimely grand by reason of their lofty and often vertical walls, but are also marvelously curious on account of the weird formations which distinguish them. The first one reached on our trip from Salt Lake was Weber Cañon, which invites attention and admiration not so much by beetling cliffs as by its great variety of scenery and the kaleidoscopic changes which appear at every hundred yards of advance into it. The cañon is not always narrow, nor are the walls invariably high, for there is a succession of all kinds of mountain scenery, including stretches of beautiful meadow land and fertile fields wrapped about the feet of giant peaks; colossal gate-ways leading into dark defiles; mighty summits breaking way through cloudland; slopes covered with pine and aspen; and ridges that appear to have been fashioned by gods of war into towers, bastions and crenelated battlements. Weber River has forged its way through this chasm, and along its sinuous and rocky bed the railroad runs, sometimes cutting under an overhanging ledge, again almost scraping the sides of the walls that swing so near together, then leaping out of night-infested chasms into broadening valleys that are green and russet with prolific fruitage. While admiring the peaceful landscape and contemplating the happy environments that render the valley a place of delightful habitation, our dreamy reflections are suddenly disturbed by a sight of what seems to have been most appropriately named The Devil’s Slide, a formation whose singularity entitles it to consideration as one of nature’s marvels. The hill upon the side of which this unique wonder occurs is about 800 feet high, composed of a dark red sandstone, whose face has been scarred by some internal disturbance that has caused to be cast up from the base two gray parallel walls of white sandstone, which rise to a varying height of twenty to forty feet above the general surface of the hill, and are not more than twenty feet apart. This remarkable slide begins at the summit and continues to the base, where it is reflected in the clear waters of Weber River, opposite Lost Creek, producing a vision that is weirdly grotesque and sublimely curious.
CASTLE GATE IN PRICE’S CAÑON, UTAH.—We observe in this photograph not only a castle gate but the castle itself, with its battlements and buttresses, as natural and picturesque as any of the ruins that lend their attractions to mediæval Europe. The scene is a grand one as we observe it from the railroad tracks, and to this grandeur there is added a vision of indescribable loveliness when the surrounding country is viewed from the dizzy heights of the castle walls. Such a view is one that never can be forgotten; it impresses itself upon the mind as a permanent and lasting memory. All tourists who have been this way will instantly recognize their old friend, the castle gate, in this splendid photograph.
JOSEPHINE FALLS, BEAR CREEK, UTAH.
“Echo Cañon,” says an English traveler, “is a superb defile. It moves along like some majestic poem in a series of incomparable stanzas. There is nothing like it in the Himalayas that I know of, nor in the Suliman range. In the Bolan Pass, on the Afghan frontier, there are intervals of equal sublimity; and even as a whole it may compare with it. But taken for all in all—its length (some thirty miles), its astonishing diversity of contour, its beauty as well as its grandeur—I confess that Echo Cañon is one of the masterpieces of Nature.”
One of the first objects which claims particular attention near the entrance to the cañon from the west is Pulpit Rock, which is near the village of Echo. This projection receives its name from its suggestive appearance as well as from the popular tradition that Brigham Young occupied it to preach his first sermon in Utah. The rocks and precipices which line the way are variegated with subdued tints, heightened by the pronounced coloring of the mountain vegetation that covers the slopes and spreads out in occasional level tracts at the base. Remarkable and often fantastic formations diversify the cañon, which for their fancied resemblance to artificial things have received such appellations as Steamboat Rock, Gibraltar, Monument Rock, etc. Our further advance brings into view towering cliffs that seem to be suspended from the sky, and again the walls reach over the way like mighty claws, and exhibit their serrated peaks in a series of ruins that in the distance conjure the imagination and present a vision of monoliths, temples, galleries and castles, such as bestrew the old world. Hanging Rock and Castle Rock are two specially bold promontories that give suggestion of Nilotic and Rhenish ruins, a verisimilitude that is intensified by the knowledge that when Johnston invaded Utah in 1857 the Mormons fortified many of the cliffs of both Weber and Echo Cañons, the fading wrecks of these structures being still visible.