July 17, 1869: We Continue Our Journey

From the journals of John Wesley Powell:

July 17, 1869/

We continue our journey. In many places the walls which rise from the water's edge are overhanging on either side. The stream is still quiet, and we glide along through a strange, weird, grand region. The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock---cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock---ten thousand strangely carved forms. Rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand. In long gentle curves the river winds about these rocks.

When speaking of these rocks, we must not conceive of piles of boulders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock with giant forms carved on it; cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored---buff, red, grey, brown and chocolate; never lichened, never moss-covered, but bare, and often polished.