like castaway drift--stout-hearted, undaunted, doing their work through it
all. After a month of this they floated smoothly out of the dark, gloomy,
roaring abyss into light and safety two hundred miles below. As the flood
rushes past us, heavy-laden with desert mud, we naturally think of its
sources, its countless silvery branches outspread on thousands of snowy
mountains along the crest of the continent, and the life of them, the
beauty of them, their history and romance. Its topmost springs are far
north and east in Wyoming and Colorado, on the snowy Wind River, Front,
Park, and Sawatch ranges, dividing the two ocean waters, and the Elk,
Wasatch, Uinta, and innumerable spurs streaked with streams, made famous
by early explorers and hunters. It is a river of rivers--the Du Chesne,
San Rafael, Yampa, Dolores, Gunnison, Cotchetopa, Uncompahgre, Eagle,
and Roaring rivers, the Green and the Grand, and scores of others with
branches innumerable, as mad and glad a band as ever sang on mountains,
descending in glory of foam and spray from snow-banks and glaciers through
their rocky moraine-dammed, beaver-dammed channels. Then, all emerging
from dark balsam and pine woods and coming together, they meander through
wide, sunny park valleys, and at length enter the great plateau and flow
in deep cañons, the beginning of the system culminating in this grand cañon
of cañons.

Our warm cañon camp is also a good place to give a thought to the glaciers
which still exist at the heads of the highest tributaries. Some of them
are of considerable size, especially those on the Wind River and Sawatch
ranges in Wyoming and Colorado. They are remnants of a vast system of
glaciers which recently covered the upper part of the Colorado basin,
sculptured its peaks, ridges, and valleys to their present forms, and
extended far out over the plateau region--how far I cannot now say. It
appears, therefore, that, however old the main trunk of the Colorado may
be, all its wide-spread upper branches and the landscapes they flow through