Our Way Today Is Again Through Marble Walls

from the journal of
John Wesley Powell:

August 23, 1869/

Our way today is again through marble walls. Now and then, we pass, for a short distance, through patches of granite, like hills thrust up into the limestone. At one of these places we have to make another portage, and, taking advantage of the delay, I go up a little stream, to the north, wading it all the way, sometimes having to plunge in to my neck. In other places I am compelled to swim across little basins that have been excavated at the foot of the falls. Along its course are many cascades and springs gushing out from the rock on either side. Sometimes a cottonwood tree grows over the water. I come to one beautiful fall of more than one hundred and fifty feet, and climb around it to the right on the broken rocks. Still going up,
I find the canyon narrowing very much, being but fifteen or twenty feet wide. yet the walls rise on either side many hundreds of feet, perhaps thousands, I can hardly tell.
In some places the stream has not excavated its channel down vertically through the rocks, but has cut obliquely so that one wall overhangs the other. In other places it is cut vertically above and obliquely below, or obliquely above and vertically below, so that it is impossible to see out overhead. But I can go no farther. The time which I estimated it would take to make the portage has almost expired, and I must start back on a round trot, wading in the creek where I must, and plunging through basins, and find the men waiting for me, and away we go on the river.
Just after lunch we pass a stream on the right which leaps into the Colorado by a direct fall of more than a hundred feet, forming a beautiful cascade. There is a bed of very hard rock above, thirty or forty feet in thickness, and much softer beds below. The hard beds above project many yards beyond the softer, which are washed out, forming a deep cave behind the fall, and the stream pours through a narrow crevice above into a deep pool below. Around on the rocks, in the cave-like chamber, are set beautiful ferns with delicate fronds and enameled stalks. The little frondlets have their points turned down, to form spore cases. It has very much the appearance of the Maiden's Hair fern, but is much larger. The delicate foliage covers the rocks all about the fountain, and gives the chamber great beauty. But we have little time to spend in admiration, so on we go.
We make fine progress this afternoon, carried along by a swift river, and shoot over the rapids, finding no serious obstructions.
The canyon walls, for two thousand five hundred or three thousand feet, are very regular, rising almost perpendicularly, but here and there set with narrow steps, and occasionally we can see above the broad terrace to distant cliffs.
We camp tonight in a marble cave, and find, at looking at our reckoning, that we have run twenty-two miles.