The winter road furnishes even more attractions than the summer
road on which line a railroad should be built through to the
Canon. Soon after leaving town a side road leads to the cliff
dwellings in Walnut Canon. Along the wayside a signboard points
the direction to the Bottomless Pit, which is a deep hole in the
ground that is only one of many such fissures in the earth found
on the Colorado Plateau. Four miles east of Canon Diablo a
narrow fissure from a few inches to several feet wide and
hundreds of feet deep has been traced in a continuous line over
one hundred miles.

Further on a group of cave dwellings can be seen among the rocks
upon a distant bill. A turn in the road next brings the Sunset
Mountain into view. Its crest glows with the colors of sunset,
which unusual effect is produced by colored rocks that are of
volcanic origin. Black cinders cover its steep sides and its
brow is the rim of a deep crater. Between Sunset Peak and
O'Leary Peak is the Black Crater from which flowed at one time
thick streams of black lava that hardened into rock and are known
as the lava beds. Scores of crater cones and miles of black
cinders can be seen from Sunset Mountain, and lava and cinders of
this region look as fresh as if an eruption had occurred but
yesterday.

A peculiarity of the pine trees which grow in the cinders is that
their roots do not go down but spread out upon the surface. Some
of the roots are entirely bare while others are half buried in
cinders. They are from an inch to a foot thick and from ten to
fifty feet long, according to the size of the tree which they