Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1883 — AWE-[?]NSP[?]R[?]NG GRANDEUR. [ARTICLE]

AWE-[?]NSP[?]R[?]NG GRANDEUR.

Magnificent Scenery in the Black Canon of the Gunnison River. Following the Gunnison river through its wide and beautiful valley in Colorado for a few miles, writes a traveler, the mountains seem to close in upon the track, and it enters one of the grandest gorges in the world, known as the black canon of the Gunnison. Here are beautiful cataracts, the water tumbling down from the mountain crags into the Gunnison river, over precipices from 1,500 to 2,000 feethigh. In one place is a dainty little cascade like the bridal veil at Niagara Falls—a slender thread of water pouring over the rock in fine spray, and falling into a little basin close to the track, which makes as beautiful a picture as can be seen anywhere. And what a magnificent Stream is the Gunnison! Its water is clear and cold, and the dark shadow s of the cliffs fall; ing upon it gives it a tint of beau iful green. Springing from a region white with eternal snows, like a thread of silver it burrows through the walls of rock whose pinnacles rise 2,000 and 3,000 feet high on either side, and is roofed in by a narrow strip oc unsullied blue sky—so narrow that one standing on the summit of one cliff could throw a stone across to the sunnnit of the other. Now the river frets and spunes and throws its foam, splashing in spray against the black rocks; again it giggles and gurgles in glee, laughs and roars at the triumph of having leaped over nature’s barriers; then tumbles headlong over a mighty rock, and with placid dignity flows along between the .great mountains, taking a fewmoments’ rest in its mad race to the sea. For fifty miles we follow the narrow chasm, steeped in the purple of a perpetual twilight. The solemn walls stand up 3,000 feet both sides of us, frowning down upon the intruders into their cloistered solitude. For a mile or two they are almost perpendicular, gray with the antique lichens that countless summers have gathered upon their purple fronts; then they are massed in broken columns standing upon a common base. Here a solitary pinaele soars upward toward the skylike a monstrous cathedral tower; there the rocks are thrown together helterskelter in piles half a mile high by some “reinbte”geblogical commotion* and again they close together and hug the current of the river for unbrokchj miles, 1 the shadows becoming -darker and gloomier. In places the hedges are hacked and torn, seared and split into great seams into which the earth has fallen, and a few sad and solitary spruce trees cling in a perilous existence. Often at a height which the sun’s rays can sometimes reach, but the wind is trever still, a tiny flower may be seen smiling with heroic fortitude, and a few feet away in a cleft in the rocks will be found an eagle’s nest. When night approaches the edges of the rocks that, standing out against the sky, cap catch the moonbeams will be fringed with a silvery phosphorescence. Looking up, one sees the narrow roof ■of sky with a fresco of stars;.looking down, there is the blackness of darkness immeasurable. An awe inspires one when he thinks that all this architectural grandeur, all these mighty chasms which would have required 1,000,000 men 1,000 years to have excavated, have been wrought by the simple agencies of water and wind and dust! These canons were not made by volcanic eruptions, the geologists tell us, but by agencies so simple as ■ those. More than one rough customer has never known how good he was until he had killed somebody and heard defended him sum'up his virtues.