Spring and summer on the plains.
Home of the antelope.
In the spring, when the snows have melted and the rains have fallen, these plains turn green with young grass and are spattered with great patches of wild-flowers; but the drouth and heat of early summer soon fade the grasses to a bright yellow, and in the fall the yellow bleaches to a dead white. There is little wild life left upon these plains. The bush-birds need more cover than is to be found here, while the ground-birds need more open roadway. In the spring, when the prairie pools are filled with water, there are geese and cranes in abundance; but they soon pass on north. These great grass tracts were once the home of countless bands of antelope, for it is just such an open country as the antelope loves; but they have passed on, too. In their place roam herds of cattle, and the gray wolf, the coyote, and the buzzard follow the herds.
Beds of soda and gypsum.
Riding into the unexpected.
The grease wood and the grass plains of Arizona and New Mexico are typical of all the flat countries lying up from the deserts; and yet there are many tracts of small acreage in this same region that show distinctly different features. Sometimes there are small beds of flat alkali dust, sometimes beds of soda and gypsum, sometimes beds of salt. Then occasionally there is a broad plain sown broadcast far and wide with blocks of lava—the remnants of a great lava-stream sent forth many centuries ago; and again flat reaches strewn thick with blocks of porphyry that have been washed down from the mountains no one knows just when or how. You are always riding into the unexpected in these barren countries, stumbling upon strange phenomena, seeing strange sights.
The Grand Canyon country.
Hills covered with juniper.
The Painted Desert.
And yet as you ascend from the valley of the Colorado moving to the northeast, the lands and the sights become even stranger. For now you are rising to the Great Plateau and the Grand Canyon country—the region of the butte, the vast escarpment, the dome, the cliff, the gorge. It is a more mountainous land than that lying to the south, and it is deeper cut with river-beds and canyons. Yet still you have no trouble in finding even here the flat spaces peculiar to all the desert-bordering territory. There are grease wood plains as at the south and great bare benches that seem endless in their sweep. There are, too, spaces covered with lava-blocks and beds of soda and salt. More rain falls here than at the south or west; and in certain sections the grass grows rank, the yuccas become trees, and higher up toward Ash Fork the hills are covered with a growth of juniper. Flowers and shrubs are more abundant, birds and animals come and go across your pathway, and there are green valleys with water running upon the surface of the ground. And yet not twenty miles from the green valley you may enter upon the most barren plain imaginable—a place like the Painted Desert, perhaps, where in spots not a living thing of any kind is seen, where there is nothing but dry rock in the mountains and dry dust in the valley. These areas of utter desolation are of frequent enough occurrence in all the regions lying immediately to the north and the east of the Mojave to remind you that you are still in a desert land, and that the bench and the arid plain are really a part of the great waste itself.