Roaring Rapids, West Clear Creek

Elsewhere for the elfin spirit in green and white. In places they achieve a more solid footing, taking over areas and growing into mature groves impressive in individual tree and extent. Dark pigmenting on the trunks lends added character to the thickening boles and the reflected light,singing among them, is distilled sunshine, filtered and purified.

Along the swaying road that leads to Point Imperial and Cape Royal, within the park, they nestle in deep swales, filling hollows with shimmering green. Around their glistening trunks, spring sends up a delicate covering of bracken, knee deep and responsive to any capricious little breeze. Aspens seem to consider, as well, that no meadow or sink is properly decorated without at least a few of their number and take care to group trunks in artistic white lines to offset the trim cones of conifers. Each "lake," if it holds any drop of precious fluid, is named and put on the forest map. Titles such as Lambs Lake, Crane Lake, Three Lakes, and others, don't necessarily guarantee enough to water a horse but can claim a unique setting, often with old corral, drooping fences, and perhaps a tumbled-down cabin to give it the romantic touch. At some, like historic Jacob Lake, the scent of the woods gathers in the clearing, heated to burning incense and lighted at deserted altars Of another day. It is easy to believe that ghosts of Indian or early pioneer can be heard fluttering through the darkmantled trees that mass in the background. When the gracious stands of trees, of many species and Josef Muench shows in color photographs views along the highway from Jacob Lake to North Rim of Grand Canyon. A modern highway cut through the Kaibab to bring the Canyon splendor to the traveler on U.S. 89. The trip itself from Jacob Lake to the Canyon is one of the most colorful in the state of Arizona.

Varieties, have been mentioned, its sinks marveled at, and the meadows touched upon, there is still much more to be said of the great green world of the Kaibab. Anyone who He knows the forest has his favorite haunts, deserving, he feels, of special mention, yet far too many to dwell upon at length. Jolly Sink can hardly be ignored, where bawling cattle gather around several small pools in a natural corral appropriate for a movie set in some cattle-rustling tale of Zane Grey's. Even more to my liking is the smaller paradise called Billy's Sink, entered through a limestone gateway and walled in by naked cliffs and slopes of Aspen. At the proper time there are flowers on the grass floor, pale-faced lupines and giddy Indian paintbrush, but never any standing water.

Favorite with anyone who has made the seventeenmile pilgrimage from the main park road to Point Sublime, is Kanabownits Canyon. All the magic of the forest is here; open stretches of musical pines; closed ranks of fir and spruce, and miles of Aspen, interspersed with clearings shaped to the rolling ground and dedicated to deer. The road finally catches up with Kanabownits Creek, chortling softly to itself as it sparkles a little way above ground and then happily loses itself in a meadow full of dandelion and columbine.

Another mile, up and out onto the very brink of the North Rim, breaks into vastly different terrain. The forest gives way to dense chaparral of scrub-oak and locust, and the Pinyon Pine takes over at the crest, towering over cliff rose, sage and a ground covering of prickly pear and tiny hedgehog cactus. Here, the sun is blinding, hot, the desert rock garden prickly but brilliant in flower, and the one hundred and fifty mile panorama-east, west, and south, truly one of the sublime views on the continent-is one more facet of the amazing Kaibab. Another view of vast proportions opens at the end of a