two or three miles in width, composed of hills of wonderful forms carved in the banded beds, and back of this is seen a cliff in the tower limestone. Along the lower course of this stretch the whole character of the canyon is changed by another set of complicating conditions, We have now reached a region of volcanic activity. After the canyons were cut nearly to their present depth, lavas poured out and volcanoes were built on the walls of the canyon, but not in the canyon itself, though at places rivers of molten rock rolled down the walls into the Colorado.
The canyon for the next eighty miles is a compound of that found where the river is in the black gneiss and that found where the dead volcanoes stand on the brink of the wall. In the first stretch, where the gneiss is at the foundation, we have a great bend to the south, and in the last stretch, where the gneiss is below and the dead volcanoes above, “another great southern detour is found. These two great beds are separated by eighty miles of comparatively straight river.
Let us call this first great bend the Kaibab reach of the canyon, and the straight part the Kanab reach, for the Kanab Creek heads far off in the plateau to the north and joins the Colorado at the beginning of the middle stretch. The third great southern bend is the Shiwits stretch, Thus there are three distinct portions of the Grand Canyon: The Kaibab section, characterized more by its buttes and salients; the Kanab section, characterized by its comparatively straight walls with volcanoes on the brink, and the Shiwits section, which is broken into great terraces with gneiss at the bottom and volcanoes at the top.
The erosion represented in the canyons, although vast, is but a small part of the great erosion of the region, for between the cliffs blocks have been carried away far superior in magnitude to those necessary to fill the canyons. Probably there is no portion of the whole region from which there have not been more than a thousand feet degraded, and there are districts from which more than 30,000 feet of rock have been carried away; altogether there is a district of country more than 200,000 square miles in extent, from which, on the average, more than 6,000 feet have been eroded. Consider a rock 200,000 square miles in extent and a mile in thickness, against which the clouds have hurled storms, and beat it into sands, and the rills have carried the sands into the creeks, and the creeks have carried them into the rivers, and the Colorado has carried them into the sea.
We think of the mountains as forming clouds about their brows, but the clouds have formed the mountains. Great continental blocks are upheaved from beneath the sea by internal gealogic forces that fashion the earth. Then the wandering clouds, the tempest-bearing clouds, the rainbow-decked clouds, with mighty power and with wonderful skill, carve out valleys and canyons and fashion hills and cliffs and mountains. The clouds are the artists sublime.
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