When speaking of these rocks, we must not conceive of piles of boulders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and cañon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes, and tall pinnacles, and shafts set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored—buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate; never lichened; never moss-covered; but bare, and often polished.
We pass a place where two bends of the river come together, an intervening rock having been worn away, and a new channel formed across. The old channel ran in a great circle around to the right, by what was once a circular peninsula; then an island; then the water left the old channel entirely, and passed through the cut, and the old bed of the river is dry. So the great circular rock stands by itself, with precipitous walls all about it, and we find but one place where it can be scaled. Looking from its summit, a long stretch of river is seen, sweeping close to the overhanging cliffs on the right, but having a little meadow between it and the wall on the left. The curve is very gentle and regular. We name this Bonita Bend.
And just here we climb out once more, to take another bearing on The Butte of the Cross. Reaching an eminence, from which we can overlook the landscape, we are surprised to find that our butte, with its wonderful form, is indeed two buttes, one so standing in front of the other that, from our last point of view, it gave the appearance of a cross.
Again, a few miles below Bonita Bend, we go out a mile or two along the rocks, toward the Orange Cliffs, passing over terraces paved with jasper.
The cliffs are not far away, and we soon reach them, and wander in some deep, painted alcoves, which attracted our attention from the river; then we return to our boats.
Late in the afternoon, the water becomes swift, and our boats make great speed. An hour of this rapid running brings us to the junction of the Grand and Green, the foot of Stillwater Cañon, as we have named it.
These streams unite in solemn depths, more than one thousand two hundred feet below the general surface of the country. The walls of the lower end of Stillwater Cañon are very beautifully curved, as the river sweeps in its meandering course. The lower end of the cañon through which the Grand comes down, is also regular, but much more direct, and we look up this stream, and out into the country beyond, and obtain glimpses of snow clad peaks, the summits of a group of mountains known as the Sierra La Sal. Down the Colorado, the cañon walls are much broken.
We row around into the Grand, and camp on its northwest bank; and here we propose to stay several days, for the purpose of determining the latitude and longitude, and the altitude of the walls. Much of the night is spent in making observations with the sextant.
The distance from the mouth of the Uinta to the head of the Cañon of Desolation is twenty and three-quarters miles. The Cañon of Desolation is ninety-seven miles long; Gray Cañon thirty-six. The course of the river through Gunnison’s Valley is twenty-seven and a quarter miles; Labyrinth Cañon, sixty-two and a half miles.