August 11.--We remain at this point to-day for the purpose of determining the latitude and longitude, measuring the height of the walls, drying our rations, and repairing our boats.
Captain Powell early in the morning takes a barometer and goes out to climb a point between the two rivers. I walk down the gorge to the left at the foot of the cliff, climb to a bench, and discover a trail, deeply worn in the rock. Where it crosses the side gulches in some
places steps have been cut. I can see no evidence of its having been traveled for a long time. It was doubtless a path used by the people who inhabited this country anterior to the present Indian races--the people who built the communal houses of which mention has been made.
I return to camp about three o'clock and find that some of the men have discovered ruins and many fragments of pottery; also etchings and hieroglyphics on the rocks.
We find to-night, on comparing the readings of the barometers, that the walls are about 3,000 feet high--more than half a mile--an altitude difficult to appreciate from a mere statement of feet. The slope by which the ascent is made is not such a slope as is usually found in climbing a mountain, but one much more abrupt--often vertical for many hundreds of feet,--so that the impression is given that we are at great depths, and we look up to see but a little patch of sky.
Between the two streams, above the Colorado Chiquito, in some places the rocks are broken and shelving for 600 Or 700 feet; then there is a sloping terrace, which can be climbed only by finding some way up a gulch; then another terrace, and back, still another cliff. The summit of the cliff is 3,000 feet above the river, as our barometers attest.
Our camp is below the Colorado Chiquito and on the eastern side of the canyon.
August 12.--The rocks above camp are rust-colored sandstones and conglomerates. Some are very hard; others quite soft. They all lie nearly horizontal, and the beds of softer material have been washed out, leaving the harder forming a series of shelves. Long lines of these are seen, of varying thickness, from one or two to twenty or thirty feet, and the spaces between have the same variability. This morning I spend two or three hours in climbing among these shelves, and then I pass above them and go up a long slope to the foot of the cliff and try to discover some way by which I can reach the top of the wall; but I find my progress cut off by an amphitheater. Then I wander away around to the left, up a little gulch and along benches, climbing from time to time, until I reach an altitude of nearly 2,000 feet and can get no higher. From this point I can look off to the west, up side canyons of the Colorado, and see the edge of a great plateau, from which streams run down into the Colorado, and deep gulches in the