Canon of Desolation.

July 8. 

This morning, Bradley and I go out to climb, and gain an altitude of more than two thousand feet above the river, but still do not reach the summit of the wall.

After dinner, we pass through a region of the wildest desolation. The canon is very tortuous, the river very rapid, and many lateral canons enter on either side. These usually have their branches, so that the region is cut into a wilderness of gray and brown cliffs. In several places, these lateral canons are only separated from each other by narrow walls, often hundreds of feet high, but so narrow in places that where softer rocks are found below, they have crumbled away, and left holes in the wall, forming passages from one canon into another.

Piles of broken rock lie against these walls; crags and tower shaped peaks are seen every where; and away above them, long lines of broken cliffs, and above and beyond the cliffs are pine forests, of which we obtain occasional glimpses, as we look up through a vista of rocks.

The walls are almost without vegetation; a few dwarf bushes are seen here and there, clinging to the rocks, and cedars grow from the crevices— not like the cedars of a land refreshed with rains, but ugly clumps, like war clubs, beset with spines. We are minded to call this the Canon of Desolation.


John Wesley Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, July 8, 1869