In a Pullman car, Grand Canyon Ltd, on the way to El Tovar. This is the day of our leaving the lovely land of California. When we were kids we sang, in a game, 'Over the Rocky Mountains, over the hills so cold, We’ll line our pockets with the golden dust of the Californian gold.' Which reminds me how very much we young goldfields youngsters in Australia were nourished on American things. Absolutely geographic and historic. It means more to me now that I am familiar with the every day appearance of numberless canyons and caverns. In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for mine placer material here is quite different from ours, darker and deeper, different, more vigorous erosion.
So we set off. The train journey was excellent. Views for miles of the glorious Sierra Madres in snow and forest. Vast plains of San Bernadino and numberless others. ‘Little’ places here and there of vineyards and orange groves that would leave Renmark in the middle and not notice it. Up a high pass, getting dryer. Arrowhead Mountains. Torrential streams. Unoccupied land, though always a few homes of men even if some very poor.
Grand Canyon is a miracle. Quite beyond description. So I will not describe it, nor attempt to. It is the greatest thing of joy and enjoyment and scientific and scenic pleasure that I have seen. Its vastness and depth and variety and purples and crimsons are vivid in my mind as I write. I hope they may ever remain there, for no pictures, even the most exquisite photos and the coloured ones, can give any true idea. Then there was the geology, and the Indians, and the lectures, rocks, fossils, watch tower, ever-present snow and forest, the Painted Desert, the Kaibab Forest, and Bright Angel trail. Sir Victor Wilson and his wife and daughters were with us all day, so that our car was dubbed by an American ‘the Australian car’.
Spent the day crossing the wide desert of Arizona and New Mexico. Americans are quite interested as they pass from one State into another. Trainmen even, who must become used to these things, remark: ‘Now we’re in Ari-zorna’ and so on. If we could have got away from the track the desert might have been even more interesting. For the influence of the Little Colorado River was everywhere. And there was some swampy area, and there was a little grazing, and ranches. Vastly more occupation than our desert. But such ranches, some of them, must have been Mexicans. The most lonely, tiny, miserable places. Numberless. And also there were some fine places like ‘Station homes’, but not often.
The braided heavily-burdened Colorado was not many miles from the rail track anywhere, sometimes crossing beneath a broad bridge, sometimes washing against the side. Here and there were remarkable evidences of river terraces, here and there no cutting at all. But always red to salmon mud with fine silt. The water, of course, comes from the melting snows, the dust from the friable fretting ferric rocks of the Painted Desert. Grays, creams, and other pinks very abundant. As we got further on, the Vermillion Sandstones (Jurassic) stood up like vertical red walls, but carved into most curious shapes. Great cathedrals, streets, warehouses. I conceived a project in one case for carving out the inside of one great red-rock formation on the inside and forming a rose-red cathedral, like Petra, ‘a rose-red city half as old as time’.
Passed close by Meteor Crater and necessarily by Canyon Diablo. Great meteorite lumps as hotel doorstops in one case. Have got to know the look of meteor crater stuff. Petrified forest close by too, but hope to see some of that later. Will get some petrified wood souvenirs. Permian? Gallup is a large coal mining town. Desert. Cretaceous. Largely Mexican, by the look of the living areas. Here and there also real Wild West towns. Girls and boys in groups and in bright coloured dresses. This I think was Buffalo Bill’s country, too, along the old Santa Fé trail, though I believe he is buried at Denver.
Shall never forget the cliff panorama as we slipped down into the valley of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. Permian, Triassic, Jurassic sediments. Granites, also. And I must not forget the basalts. I twigged the first tiny outliers of the basalt flows yesterday. Great bare black raw rock masses, cracked and broken as they cooled. No change since. Then there were more and more, then dense basalt flows, then gorges, not deep. Flows mostly very mobile, about 20 feet deep. Later thicker. Mesas topped by basalt Roman wall columnar, scoria, dense as pahoehoe etc, a vast and very fine lava field—Recent or Late Pleistocene.
How suitable that Spain should have peopled these areas first, people who knew a land of desert plateaus, with snow mountains. No-one else, maybe, could have done it, put the missions across successfully. Near Zuna, which we saw, is the only remaining pueblo of the historic tragedy of the Seven Cities of Cibola. Though parts of these deserts look like ours, there is a variety, colour, and some quality due to elevation that is quite distinct. Another thing is the highways—road and rail. Magnificent roads and railways. Incredibly long freight and passenger trains.
La Fonda Hotel. Santa Fé. Forgot to mention yesterday that when we got to the lowland there was a vast grey dreary sandy waste—all desert. Deep broad level-bedded alluvium. Through a thick pall of dust, yet not too thick, we could still detect a ghostly glimmering snowcapped mountain. Of the formations seen, there was the Mesa Verde of Gallup, with its coals, Upper Cretaceous. Navajo sandstones, Jurassic. Sauceage: the vermillion cliffs, of which the Rainbow Bridge and other things hereabouts are made; the Shinarump formations, Triassic, in which the petrified forests occur, and the Moenkopi shale of Cedar Mesa (May-sa) seen from the Watch Tower (Grand Canyon), Triassic.
The American Indians here are smiling, homely sort of folk, with impassive faces that can laugh. Kids real American. Dirty and spoilt. The Mongolian epicanthic fold very well marked, particularly in kiddies. This afternoon went on a 40-mile drive up the valley of the Rio Grande. Magical geography and geology. Vast terraces and plateaus and fan deltas of heavy alluvial drift. Incredible. Must have been a prodigious period of river erosion and aggradation. Positively incredible. Read Darwin’s descriptions of something similar off the Andes eastward. He was shaken by the phenomenon.