“The lava beds of Idaho are a marked feature of that Territory. Starting near the eastern boundary, they extend southwesterly for a long distance, and are from 300 feet to 900 feet in depth. This mass was once a river of molten fire, the making of which must have succeeded a convulsion of nature more terrible than any ever witnessed by mortals, and long years must have passed before the awful fiery mass was cooled. To the east of the source of the lava flow, the Snake River bursts out of the hills, becoming almost at once a sovereign river, and flowing at first southwesterly and then bending westerly, cuts through the lava fields nearly in the center of the Territory, reckoned from east to west, and about forty miles north of its southern border, and thence flowing with great curves, merges finally with the Columbia. The two rivers combined make one of the chief waterways of the continent, and here and there take on pictures of great beauty. Never anywhere else was there such a scene; never anywhere else was so beautiful a picture hung in so rude a frame; never anywhere else, on a background so forbidding and weird, were so many glories clustered. Around and beyond, there is nothing but the desert—sere, silent, lifeless—as though Desolation had builded there everlasting thrones to Sorrow and Despair.
BAD LANDS OF WYOMING.
“Away back in remote ages, over the withered breast of the desert, a river of fire, 100 miles wide and 400 miles long, was turned. As the fiery mass cooled, its red waves became transfixed, and turned black, giving to the double-desert an indescribably blasted and forbidding face.
“But while this river of fire was in flow, a river of water was fighting its way across it, or has since made war and forged out for itself a channel through the mass. This channel looks like the grave of a volcano that had been robbed of its dead. But right between its crumbling and repellent walls, transfiguration appears. And such a picture! A river as lordly as the Hudson or Ohio, springing from the distant snow-crested Tetons, with waters transparent as glass, but green as emerald, with majestic flow and ever-increasing volume, sweeps on until it reaches this point where the display begins.
“Suddenly, in different places in the river-bed, jagged rocky reefs are upheaved, dividing the current into four rivers, and these, in a mighty plunge of eighty feet downward, dash on their way. Of course the waters are churned into foam, and roll over the precipice white as are the garments of the morning when no cloud obscures the sun. The loveliest of these falls is called “The Bridal Veil,” because it is made of the lace which is woven with a warp of falling waters and a woof of sunlight. Above this and near the right bank, is a long trail of foam, and this is called “The Bridal Trail.” The other channels are not so fair as the one called “The Bridal Veil,” but they are more fierce and wild, and carry in their ferocious sweep more power.
WEBER VALLEY, AND TUNNEL THROUGH GRANITE WALLS, UTAH.—We have a beautiful landscape and a grand mountain view combined in this fine photograph. The rugged wall of granite, through which the railroad tunnel has been cut, forms an appropriate frame for the picture of the peaceful valley and the winding river. The place has a restful look, inviting to the weary worker who seeks rest and health away from the noise and hustle of city life. Here, shut in by the surrounding walls, and with rod in hand, one could sit upon the banks of the mirror-like stream and imagine himself out of the world and away from all its cares and worries. It seems almost a pity that the demands of modern commerce should require the cutting of the hill and the breaking of the solitude by the screaming of the rushing locomotive.