The little stream, freed from the turbines, whirls furiously round a small basin and rollicks off on a wild, headlong dash through an open sluiceway for a short distance. Then another flume arrests it; and as we hike along down the trail, that flume rises above us, straddling gulches on high trestles, and at two points tunneling through a great mountain.
We get back to the mouth of the cañon, and there see, on the level we have then reached, another power-house, larger than the first. Behind it is another huge, bare mountain of rock; and coming down that, another gigantic black snake, also poking its head into the power-house. This snake—or penstock—is 1600 feet long, and the same stream which developed 800 horse-power at the upper house is now—with the addition of a little water picked up on the way—reeling off 2600 horse-power at this house.
This imprisoned, raging torrent is now released, and flows in a subdued, gentle stream down a natural stream-bed. It is less than eight feet wide and not deep enough to wet our horses' knees as we ford across. But we gaze upon it with the awe and amazement it deserves when we remember that, but a few moments before, it has sent its great power over eleven miles of wire to a small town, is operating several factories, and will, at night, light all the streets and the houses.
And that is only half its work! Before us is a great stretch of orchards and fields, vividly green, although they have not had one drop of water from the heavens for three or four months. All their health and vigor and wonderful productivity is due to that little stream, which irrigates over three thousand acres of the land.
Within twenty miles of where this is written, at the foot of the great Wasatch Mountains, in Utah, are five such cañons with power-houses—two of them with two houses in each cañon. All over this mountain country, from the middle of Utah to the Canadian line, are hundreds of such mountain torrents, only a small proportion of which are yet harnessed for work.
Some of them are very much larger than the one we have visited. Come with me to one of these larger houses.
It is in a cañon of awful sublimity, so deep and so nearly unapproachable that the construction teams had to haul over eight miles of zigzag trail to make the descent of less than half a mile to the torrent. We scramble down over the rocks and brush; and although the roar of the water reaches us for ten or fifteen minutes before we see it, we are by no means prepared for the astounding scene when it at last comes into view.
Out from the depths of the great ugly building belch forth four gleaming, horizontal columns of water, big as barrels, with a force, speed, and roar as though the discharge were from giant cannon. Straight across the tail-race they gleam and quiver for a hundred feet, impinging upon a solid ledge of granite, in which they have worn huge caverns. The spray dashes up the face of the ledge for sixty or seventy feet. Up and down the stream, swirling and writhing in a thousand rushing, crowding whirlpools, the water, just freed from its maddening confinement, is seeking to make good its escape. But it is jammed back into the upper race, and for fifty yards you will see it hanging, ledge upon ledge, fighting, snarling, surging, and struggling for its chance to slip beneath those terrific outlet volleys and gain the lower stream and liberty and peace.
The mighty Niagara has no such background of wild beauty, nor does it ever convey such an instant impression of water force. Once I saw a big two-inch plank dropped into one of those furious water columns. It seemed scarcely to touch the water, but flew, faster than the eye could follow, over to the granite ledge and was instantly smashed into ten thousand splinters, and I knew that even before the plank had reached the ledge, the mighty power which hurled it, transmuted into electricity, had already reached, and was operating, street-cars in a city seventy miles away.
Come into the power-house. Look at the four gigantic generators, whirling and humming like leviathan June-bugs—see the wicked, sputtering little blue sparks from the commutators. From the windows at the back of the building we look up a very sharp slope, 1500 feet high, and see the penstocks—twenty-four-inch steel tubes, black, ungainly, and, at twilight, very uncanny. They follow in curves the profile of the rough ground, bringing the furious rush of water from the summit down to the turbines in the lower basement, turning out 26,000 horse-power.