The only feasible entrance is upon the east side through a remarkable cañon sixty yards wide, formed by craggy rocks six or eight hundred feet in altitude, succeeded by a still narrower and more precipitous one, towering to a height of twelve or fifteen hundred feet.
This valley is intersected by Green river, which, emerging from the lofty ridges above, and tracing its way through the narrow and frightful cañons below, here presents a broad, smooth stream, fifty or sixty yards wide, with sloping banks, and passably well timbered.
Here all the various wild fruits indigenous to the country are found in great abundance, with countless multitudes of deer, elk, and sheep.
The soil is of a dark loam, very fertile and admirably adapted to cultivation. Vegetation attains a rank growth and continues green the entire year.
Spring wedded to summer seems to have chosen this sequestered spot for her fixed habitation, where, when dying autumn woos the sere frost and snow, of winter she may withdraw to her flower-garnished retreat and smile and bloom forever.
The surrounding mountains are from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet high, and present several peaks where snow claims an unyielding dominion year after year, in awful contrast with the beauty and loveliness that lies below.
Few localities in the mountains are equal to this, in point of beautiful and romantic scenery. Every thing embraced in its confines tends to inspire the beholder with commingled feelings of awe and admiration.
Its long, narrow gate-way, walled in by huge impending rocks, for hundreds of feet in altitude, — the lofty peaks that surround it, clothed in eternal snow, — the bold stream traversing it, whose heaving bosom pours sweet music into the ears of listening solitude, — the verdant lawn, spreading far and wide, garnished with blushing wild-flowers and arrayed in the habiliments of perennial spring, — all, all combine to invest it with an enchantment as soul-expanding in its sublimity as it is fascinating in its loveliness.
The country contiguous to Bear river, back from the valleys, is generally rugged and sterile. Sometimes the surface for a considerable extent is entirely destitute of vegetation, and presents a dreary waste of rocks, or clay hardened to a stone-like consistency by the sun's rays. Now and then a few dwarfish pines and cedars meet the eye amid the surrounding desolation, and occasional clusters of coarse grass intervene at favoring depressions among the rocks.
