Kaibab National Forest
Beautiful as are the plains, the transition to the limitless park-like forests of the Kaibab is a welcome delight. Kaibab is a Piute Indian word meaning “Mountain-lying-down,” a description that fits it well. It is actually a vast plateau, some fifty miles long and thirty-five miles wide, and containing 500 square miles of yellow pine, fir and spruce diversified by charming aspen copses, the largest and most beautiful virgin forest in the United States. In elevation it rises from 7,500 to 9,300 feet above sea level.
Kaibab Forest occupies the top of a lofty plateau isolated on the south and east by the Grand Canyon, on the north and west by the mysterious plains above which it rises 5,000 feet. On all sides are unexplored plateaus and canyons where untouched cliff dwellings stand. Beneath its stately trees the grassy forest floor is free from underbrush and fallen timber, as clean as if raked daily by ten thousand foresters; and, although they are not widely distributed, there are many lovely wild flowers and ferns. Scattered throughout its great extent are spacious “parks,” green-swarded, treeless open spaces bordered by white-boled, quivering aspens, the advancing light cavalry of an innumerable army of deploying pines. The witchery of these sylvan plaisances is wholly irresistible; they seem designed for parades and pageants, for the light-hearted moods of man and beast.
And so, indeed, they are employed. Afternoon and morning they are the gathering places of many of the 30,000 black-tail mule deer that range unfrightened through the forest. They do not require patient stalking to be seen; crossing the forest one may usually count several hundred haughty bucks, solicitous does, and adorable prancing fawns of exquisite grace. Their only enemies are the cougars, much reduced in number by “Uncle” Jimmy Owens, the government hunter who was Roosevelt’s guide, and other official huntsmen. Second in interest of the Kaibab’s creatures is the white-tailed squirrel (Sciurus Kaibabensis) which may ordinarily be seen flickering through the forest near Jacobs Lake Ranger Station. This is the most beautiful squirrel in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the rarest, for it lives nowhere else. It is about the size of a large gray squirrel, though shorter and stockier, is dark bluish gray marked with brown, has long tufted ears and a broad feathery tail that is almost pure white. Cougars and mountain sheep are rarely seen by the ordinary traveler. Captain Dutton wrote of a visit to the Kaibab in 1880: “It is difficult to say precisely wherein the charm of the sylvan scenery of the Kaibab consists. We, who through successive summers have wandered through its forests and parks, have come to regard it as the most enchanting region it has been our privilege to visit.
“There is a constant succession of parks and glades—dreamy avenues of grass and flowers winding between sylvan walls, or spreading out in broad open meadows.... The balmy air, the dark and sombre spruces, the pale-green aspens, the golden shafts of sunshine shot through their foliage, the velvet sward—surely this is the home of the woodland nymphs.”
The Filigreed Walls of Bryce Canyon
The North Rim of the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon is the supreme epic of erosion; there water has perpetuated its sublimest masterpiece in stone. “The Grand Canyon fills me with awe,” wrote Roosevelt. “It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world.” “Wildness so Godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of the earth’s beauty and size,” said John Muir. “By far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles,” is the opinion of world travelers who have studied its grandeur.
The Grand Canyon may be described as a vast and intricate range of sunken mountains cut through a hundred miles of high plateau, “a mountain chain reversed.” Usually it is pictured as a colossal chasm, 220 miles in length, a mile deep and some twelve miles wide; but it is more precisely a measureless labyrinth of canyons with an infinite array of magnificent architectural forms upthrust from their depths. Deep down in the uttermost gorge of granite, the Colorado, “the rushingest, roaringest” river in the land, grinds ceaselessly at the rocks. Numberless rich and vivid tones of gray, green, blue, red and mauve tint its mighty walls and temples, and, independent of these, the sunlight pours daily into the chasm a shifting color parade of exquisite blues and purples, glowing reds and golds.