So On We Go

Ramblin' Jack Elliott : Buffalo Skinners

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.

--John Wesley Powell
journal entry for August 23, 1869

SCORPION RIDGE
CRYSTAL RAPID
ROYAL ARCH CREEK AT ELVES CHASM (2)
BIGHORN SKULL, SLATE CANYON
CHEYAVA FALLS
WOTANS THRONE AND VISHNU TEMPLE DISTANT