CROSSING BALD ROCK, ON RAINBOW BRIDGE TRAIL.
The worst bit of trail on the way to the bridge.
To our left, beyond masses of smooth, marvelously contorted sandstone rose white cliffs, seared and ghostly, and beyond them, far reaches of mountain, with Navajo king of all. Clouds and mist encircled its slopes, but the peak rose clear above them into a thunderous sky. We kept the grand old mountain in sight for several miles, then dipped into a small and lovely valley, full of flowers and watered by a winding stream. This was Surprise Valley, famous in the movies as the scene of a thrilling tale of a man and woman walled in for years by one boulder pushed to block the only entrance. It is a pity to spoil the thrill, but I could not see how any one boulder, however large, could block all exit from this valley. Nevertheless its seclusion and unexpectedness make it a delight. The inevitable cliffs surround it in a red circle, and once within, a stranger could look for hours for the trail out.
Thus far, the trail had been not only beautiful, but climacteric, and from this point to the great arch it was entirely outside one’s experience. We had to recreate our sense of proportions to fit the gigantic land. I felt as if I had been shipwrecked on the moon. We who started feeling fairly important and self-satisfied and had become daily more insignificant, were mere specks in a landscape carved out by giants,—a landscape of sculptors, done by some Rodin of the gods, who had massed and hurled mountains of rock about, twisted them in a thousand fantastic figures, as if they had been mere handfuls of clay. Against the prodigious canyons down which our tired beasts slowly carried us, we were too small to be seen. Nonnezoche Boco,—“Rainbow Canyon,” in the Navajo,—brought us into an ever narrowing pass with terra-cotta walls rising thousands of feet on every side, and a turbulent stream, much interrupted by boulders, at the bottom. Sometimes we threaded the valley floor, and sometimes mounted to a shelf along the edge. Finally, when it seemed impossible for Nature to reserve any climax for us, we looked to the left,—and saw an anticlimax. We had been straining our eyes straight ahead, each eager for the first sight of the Bridge, the mammoth bridge, highest in the world. As we crossed the canyon, looking down its length we saw a toy arch nestled among the smooth cliffs, like a mouse among elephants.
Not till we had wound down the trail overlooking the river and leading under the bridge, not till we dismounted under the buttresses of the arch, and saw that they themselves were young hills did we get an idea of its majesty. Our Navajo walked around it, for no good Navajo will pass under the sacred arch unless he knows the prayer suitable to this occasion. We followed Hostein Chee, and camped on a slope on the other side. From this angle the bridge appeared stupendous, towering above cliffs really much higher, but seeming less by the perspective. Unlike so many of Nature’s freaks, it required no imagination to make it look like an arch. Symmetrical and rhythmic of outline, with its massive buttresses in beautiful proportion to the rest, it spans the San Juan, which, cutting through the narrow canyon, curves about to form deep pools into which we lost no time in plunging, after our hot and nearly bathless journey.
Whoever called it a bridge misnamed it, for it bridges nothing. Before seeing it we had ambitions to climb to the top, and walk across, and while I daresay we should all have gone if any one of us had insisted on attempting it, we may have been secretly relieved that nobody insisted too hard. It means a stiff climb negotiated with ropes, up an adjacent cliff. From the level top of this cliff one works around to a monument rock near the southwest end of the arch where a single piñon grows from a niche. A rope is swung from the cliff above, fastened in the piñon, and over a twenty-foot gap, at a height of three hundred feet and more above the rock-strewn river, one jumps to the shelving arch of the bridge. Returning is even worse than going—I believe only eight people have ever mounted the bridge.
RAINBOW BRIDGE, UTAH.
Symmetrical and rhythmic of outline, it spans the San Juan.