J. FRANK DOBIE OF TEXAS

Mr. Southwest: J. Frank Dobie of Texas

BY LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL America has always had a way of raising a steady crop of great individualists in all the fields of human endeavorscience, industry, politics, and the artswho by their wit and their wisdom (I am thinking, for example, of Franklin, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Edison, Henry Ford, and Teddy Roosevelt) have become as uniquely American as ham and eggs, Coney Island red hots, blueberry muffins, and pie a la mode.

Our own time has been no exception. From all parts of the country they come. New England's Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright from the Middle West, Will Rogers from Claremore, Oklahoma, and the man that my head and heart tell me is one of the most uniquely great Americans of this or any time, J. Frank Dobie of Texas, cowman, teacher, writer, folklorist, historian, and eloquent spokesman for all that is deep and decent, earthy and beautiful in the great state he inhabits.

Dobie is as truly a Texan as mesquite, longhorns, and the Alamo. Let him tell of his origins and influences in his own forthright way: "I was born, September 26, 1888, the oldest of sixchildren, on a ranch owned by my parents in Live Oak County, Texas-in the brush country towards the Mexican border. That land, my stalwart and upright parents, and English literature, to which they introduced me, have been the chief influences of my life."

After taking B.A. and M.A. degrees at Southwestern and Columbia universities and being led by his love of poetry to the teaching of English, Dobie joined the faculty at the University of Texas, but soon resigned for economic reasons to manage a quarter-million-acre ranch for his uncle, Jim Dobie, down in his native brush country. Let him take up the story again in his own words: "On this ranch, where I lived mostly with Mexican vaqueros, I came to a consciousness of the folklore of the Southwest and of range traditions. I decided to collect the legends and folk tales of my land. In 1922 I was back at the University of Texas and began editing the publications of the Texas Folklore Society, for which I was secretary and editor for twenty years."

"I have tried to give significance to the natural things of the Southwest and to emphasize its cultural inheritance. Yet I combat provincial-mindedness. After teaching 'Life and Literature of the Southwest' for years, I came to the conclusion that the Southwest needs perspective on itself and the rest of the world, as much as it needs knowledge of its own past."

This is what makes Dobie an unusual if not actually unique Texan-the way that he has transcended the boundaries of his almost boundless native state and become universal in his interests and his implications, illustrating Yeats's dictum, "The core of a thing must be local or national and yet infinitely translatable." Needless to say, he is anathema to the horn-tooting Texan of the roosterbooster school. He is a great Southwesterner. Mr. Southwest himself, a man to serve as a symbol of the free and easy ways of the wide-open spaces.

Published first by Texans, Dobie's books soon found eastern sponsors, and his articles became regular features of The Country Gentleman and the Saturday Evening Post. In the traditions and folklore of Texas and the Southwest, he found those elements which made them meaningful to people everywhere. He was not the bragging Texan of the smoking-room story. Dobie has always been the foe of this loud and flashy kind of character, and although his work is as full-bodied and expansive as his native state, Dobie also has the redeeming qualities of humility, modesty, and gentleness. His is one of the most famous grins in history. When Dobie's weathered face cracks with amusement, the atmosphere around him is charged with good humor. His grin has more fun in it than the laughs of a dozen comics. Seeing it is like feeling radiant heat at first hand. I've always thought his likeness should be minted into the national coinage, for then people with money would feel doubly good. He should also be endowed as a natural resource of the U.S.A. and put on a national network. His is the kind of nonconforming, independent, and outspoken Americanism which has made us a great nation.

In World War I, Dobie saw service in France as an officer in the field artillery, and in World War II he performed more lasting service as a visiting professor of American history at Cambridge University. The experiences of this year, he says, make it the most influential single year in his life. Not since the time of Joaquin Miller had the British Isles harbored such a colorful American-with this difference, Miller was a phony, Dobie the real thing. And when Cambridge awarded him an honor-ary M.A. degree, the citation read, Petasatus inter togatas homines, which translates as, "sombrero wearer among the men with togas."

A Texan in England is the book Dobie wrote about that memorable year, and it is one of the most humane and civilized Anglo-American tributes ever penned, a loving documentation of his statement that the year in England was the most significant year of his life. If I were Secretary of State, I would make it required reading for everyone in the foreign service, not just those in England.

I like its closing story: "Twenty years ago on the plaza in Santa Fé I bought an earthen jar from a Pueblo Indian woman. I bought it because it made me feel pleasant. It has a bird painted on it. After I had paid the woman her dollar, just at which time her husband came up, I asked her what bird the picture represents. She looked at the bird, she looked at her benign-featured husband, she looked at me, and then with a laugh that rippled into the sunshine she said, 'Es un pájaro que canta.'"

And, says Dobie, England England made him respond in the manner of the singing bird on the Pueblo jar. England responded to him too, for Dobie's joyousness is like a Texas gusher.

Of all the legends of the Southwest those of lost mines and buried treasure are the most widespread and alluring, and it was with a book about them that Dobie first reached a national audience. Coronado's Children

was published at Dallas in 1930 and at Boston in the fol-lowing year, and it has been in print ever since. "What the Golden Fleece was to the Greeks or what El Dorado-the Gilded Man-has been to South America, the lost mines on the San Saba and Llano rivers in Texas have been to all that part of the United States once owned by Spain."

Thus Dobie begins his first chapter. His preface con-tains the usual acknowledgments to librarians and archi-vists and scholars who helped him-Dobie is unusually scrupulous and generous in crediting those who helped him on each book-he writes with tongue-in-cheek this Dobiesque passage: "Who preside over the genial branches of the Grass-hoppers' Library in the sunshine of the Pecos, beside the elms and oaks on Waller Creek, down the mesquite flats on the Nucces River, up the canyons of the Rio Grande, under the blue haze of the Guadalupes, deep in the soft Wichitas, over the hills of the San Saba, and in many an-other happily remembered place, where I have pursued 'scholarly enquiries,' I cannot name. I wish I could, for in the wide-spreading Grasshoppers' Library I have learned the most valuable things I know."

Nine years later Coronado's Children had a sequel called Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, in which Dobie developed tales which came to him as a result of his first book and which he pursued by his usual field work in that Grasshoppers' Library throughout Old and New Mexico. Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver also marked the beginning of collaboration and friendship with the El Paso artist, Tom Lea. Lea's illustrations for the book per-fectly catch the eerie quality of treasure hunting under the threat of scalping knives.

Tom Lea went on later to become an equally accomplished artist with pen, writing The Brave Bulls and The Wonderful Country, two of the finest of all Texan-Mexican novels. Dobie's magnificent tribute to Lea appears as an introduction to the portfolio of reproductions of Lea's paintings published by the University of Texas Press in 1953.

Generosity, to both the living and the dead, is a hall-mark of Dobie's genius. Another example occurs in his introduction to The Collected Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, the New Mexican cowboy writer.

The success of his first books brought grants to Dobie from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, and enabled him to live in Mexico for a year.

"During this year and during years that immediately followed I made various trips on horseback or muleback, with pack outfit and mozo (combination guide and serv-ant), wandering through the vast, unpopulated mountains of Mexico, lingering at ranches and mining camps, living the freest times of my life. Anybody who reads the present book will make a mistake if he takes everything literally . . . I tried to weave the life of the Mexican earth into a pattern. It is truer, I think, than a literal chronicle of what I saw, whom I heard, and where I rode or slept would have been."

The product of those journeys, Tongues of the Monte, a volume rich with the bittersweet flavor of the land South of the Border, is Dobie's own favorite of all the books he has written-"that title says something to me. The earth remembers; the earth speaks; the understanders of what it says are the humble ones in Mexico at least."

Dobie's first book, A Vaquero of the Brush Country (1929), is deep Texan. He took the memoirs of an old cowman, John Duncan Young, melted them down and retold them in his own magical way. What do I mean by magical? The book is down-to-earth range literature with none of the romantic nonsense Dobie detests so in the work of Zane Grey, and it is also illuminated by incan-descent passages of prose about the Trans Pecos or mes-quite brush. Here is an example of the latter: "Perhaps no widely dispersed tree growth responds more apparently to climate, altitude, and latitude than the mesquite. In the southern part of Live Oak County, where it seems generally to reach its maximum growth, it de-velops into great trees; on the Llano River and out on the Edwards Plateau it is gnarled and black-barked, the tops conspicuously thin; on the Plains it is just 'switch mes-quite.' Again, far out in the sandy draws of the Sonoran desert against the Gulf of California the mesquite's leaves are very small, to lessen evaporation, and many of them, defying winter freezes, hang on the branches until spring; here, too, the top of the tree is a bunch of dozens of stems, or limbs, that run up from the trunk-base, sprangle out like the stems of the ocotillo and, when the tree-generally covered with an enormous amount of mistle-toe-attains age and size, bend over like the limbs of a weeping willow or a pepper tree. The thorns on the mesquite vary in number and size as much as the tree itself varies. In the Brasada, the heart of the mesquite country, this extraor-dinary growth ranges from little switches to big trees, and the multitudinous thorns on it are long and sharp." "The mesquite is just one among many thorned growths that characterize the Brasada, most of them known to the people of the region only by their Mexican names. They give the land a character as singular as that afforded to Corsica by the maquis or to Florida by the everglades. Here are mogotes (thick patches) of the ever-green, stubborn, beautiful coma with dirklike thorns, and, in season, with blue berries which the Mexican dove likes so much that it constantly coos-if we are to believe Mexican folk-'comer comas, comer comas,' saying that it wants to eat coma berries. Here are vast cejas-another term of the vaqueros for 'thicket,' usually coupled with the adjective barbara (fierce) of the green brasil and clepino; of the wandlike retama, green also of bark and leaf, its adder-toothed thorns disguised all summer long under yellow flowers that give it another name, lluvia de oro (shower of gold); of retama chino; and of the junco (the all-thorn), which, naked of leaves, was, according to Mexican belief, woven into Christ's crown of thorns, and, as a result, has even since been shunned by all birds of the air save one-the butcher bird, who alone will alight upon it. Granjeno, which grows succulent yellow berries; cat's claw, which never releases its hold; balsam-breather buajilla, over-spreading and making soft to the eye ten thousand hills, its diminutive and sparse thorns powerless to prevent its leaves from affording the best browse in North America for horses and cattle or its bloom from imparting to honey a flavor that only alfalfa can equal; agarita (wild currant), every leaf an armada of spines, first of all shrubs of the campo to anticipate spring by its buds; sweet-scented white brush, and sweeter vara dulce, cousins, prickly without thorns, and fine for bees; bitter and sharp amargosa, famous for its medicinal tea; black chaparral (chaparro prieto), the name of which is not generic to borderers as it is to Easterners but denotative of a particular growth that in many places spreads high, thick, and unbroken over thousands and thousands of acres; prickly pear, often growing higher than a man on horseback; tasajillo (rat-tail cactus), which, excepting the cholla, has more thorns per square inch than any other growth known to vaqueros, which in winter is bizarre and beautiful with a studding of red berries that are fancied by blue topknot Mexican quail and wild turkeys; the accursed devil's head; the proud Spanish dagger, which affords a poison effective in antidoting rattlesnake biteall these growths of thorn and fiber show their thorough adaptation to the country by diverging into many varieties and to each other by locking lances, as it were, to ward off any intrusion. Foreigners-the Texan meaning of which is anyone who lives outside of Texas-can never comprehend the size of Texas until they have traversed it, by auto, train, or plane, either lengthwise from Amarillo to Corpus Christi, or crosswise from Houston to El Paso.

Foreigners-the Texan meaning of which is anyone who lives outside of Texas-can never comprehend the size of Texas until they have traversed it, by auto, train, or plane, either lengthwise from Amarillo to Corpus Christi, or crosswise from Houston to El Paso.

"My God! Are we still in Texas?" one hears, day after day, when riding the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles; and even a plane ride takes most of the day to cross the state. Among other things this means that a Texan writer has unlmited subject matter, without ever stepping into a neighboring state, and Dobie has worked this rich mine with lifelong industry and imagination, opening up a new vein with each succeeding book.

From writing about Texan humans he turned to a series of books about Texan animals, starting with The Longhorns in 1941, again powerfully illustrated by Tom Lea.

Dobie never beats around the mesquite when he begins a book. The reader knows at once exactly what the author is up to, as in this opening of The Longhorns: "The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle the civilized world has known. As an animal in the realm of natural history, he was the peer of bison or grizzly bear. As a social factor, his influence on men was extraordinary. An economic agent in determining the character and occupation of a territory continental in its vastness, he moved elementally with drouth, grass, blizzards out of the arctic and wind from the south. However supplanted or however disparaged by evolving standards and generations, he will remain the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded. In picturesqueness and romantic realism his name is destined for remembrance as long as the memory of man travels back to those pristine times when waters ran clear, when free grass waved a carpet over the face of the earth, and America's Man on Horseback-not a helmeted soldier, but a booted cowboy-rode over the rim with all the abandon, energy, insolence, pride, carelessness and confidence epitomizing the booming West."

It was inevitable that Dobie came sooner or later to the Longhorn, (bos Texammus) for he was born in that part of Texas where the Longhorn was most at home and where he made his last stand, was born of trail-driving descended parents on both sides and raised with Longhorns and Vaqueros.

The Longhorns is a correspondingly authentic and picturesque work, ranking high in my opinion among Dobie's highest achievements. In addition to the Tom Lea drawings, the book contains a photographic gallery of the wide-horned animal, and tributes to earlier illustrators such as Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Ed Borein, Maynard Dixon, and Will James. It contains also the statement "There is not in all America a properly mounted example of the Longhorn"-a condition which may have been rectified since the book first appeared sixteen years ago.

Eleven years later, and after he had parted ways with the trustees of the University of Texas over the issue of academic freedom, Dobie brought the same immense talent to another labor of love called The Mustangs, a history of the wild horses of the West and of the Horse Age in America. No better symbol for freedom and the ways of liberty could he have chosen, and this book, researched for many years and written on a fellowship at the Huntington Library, is a powerful demonstration of Dobie's own definition of excellence in historical writing: "When interpretative power, just evaluation, controlled imagination and craftsmanship are added to mastery of facts."

Every page of The Mustangs clamors to be quoted from. Space allows only the peroration which closes the book: "Well, the wild ones the coyote duns, the smokies, the blues, the blue roans, the snip-nosed pintos, the fleabitten grays and the black-shinned whites, the shining blacks and the rusty browns, the red roans, the toasted sorrels and the stockinged bays, the splotched apaloosas and the cream-maned palominos, and all the others in shadings of color as various as the hues that show and fade on the clouds at sunset-they are all gone now, gone as completely as the free grass they vivified. Only through 'visionary gleam' can any man ever again run with them, for only in the symbolism of poetry does ghost draw lover in hope-continued pursuit.

Then follows a roll call of American places named for wild horses-a veritable geographic prose poem ending, "The wild horses have left a kind of song."

I heard Dobie read this concluding passage once at the close of a lecture on the literature of the Southwest, and it was as if Homer had returned to earth.

The Voice of the Coyote (1949) is another great example of the way Frank Dobie combines natural history, folklore, earthy philosophy, and deep sympathy, in writing a book about the little critter called the Robin Hood of the West. He points out that the earlier frontier attitude toward wild animals was simply that of killing them, and that sympathy with wild creatures is a civilized attitude which usually arrives after most of the wild life has been rendered extinct.

It is also a savage attitude, Dobie finds, in a chapter on the Indians' harmony with nature, their feeling of brotherhood toward the coyote and other animals. The American Indian's sympathy for fellow animals, Dobie says, was not sentiment or superstition; nor was it an expression of intellectual curiosity; it was a part of his harmony with nature.

Dobie is interesting to note that Dobie has never written at length about outlaws and badmen. His interests and values have always been creative, positive, and humane, all of which qualities are found at the other end of the pole from those of the characters and collectors of frontier violence.

Dobie's monograph on the road-runner, the state bird of Texas known as the paisano, is another example of his ability to fuse natural history and folklore. He is working now on a book about the folklore of the rattlesnake.

Dobie is creative and original in all that he does, even in compiling a bibliography. His Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, originally the reading list for his course in the University of Texas, is far and away the best such guide ever compiled. Its only weakness, from my point of view, is a neglect of the literature of Southern California, an area which Dobie is just a bit suspicious of as being only marginally Southwestern. Published first in 1942, the Guide was reissued ten years later "revised and enlarged in both knowledge and wisdom." True.

Dobie's preface to this Guide is anti-provincial, anticonformity, anti-tyranny. "I have never tried to define regionalism. Its blanket has been put over a great deal of worthless writing. Robert Frost has approached a satisfying conception. The land is always in my bones,' he said -the land of rock fences. But, 'I am not a regionalist. I am a realmist. I write about realms of democracy and realms of the spirit."

Dobie intended his Guide "to help people of the Southwest see significances in the features of the land to which they belong, to make their environments more interesting to them, their past more alive, to bring them to a realization of the values of their own cultural inheritance, and to stimulate them to observe.

It is the one indispensable book about Southwestern books, in a class by itself. Dobie's notes on the books listed therein are like scattered seeds, always falling on fertile soil somewhere and producing new life growth. My first reading of the Guide changed the direction of my lifethe highest tribute one could pay to any book.

I first met Dobie at UCLA where I work. It was characteristic that he almost missed the lecture he was to give for having encountered a campus workman whom he recognized as a horse wrangler he had once known.

It was not until I visited Dobie in his home town of Austin, however, that I got the true flavor of the man, seeing him among his books and artifacts, with his wife Bertha McKee Dobie at his side, helpmeet and good critic of all his undertakings.

I had flown in from New York via Dallas, and I found Austin a tree-green oasis, its streets musically named for the rivers of Texas: Brazos, Puercos, and Pecos, Nuevos, Neches, Colorado, and Guadalupe. In the university library I spent a quiet hour on the high outdoor reading terrace, backed by the noble Wrenn and Stark collections of English literature, but it was not Shakespeare or Shelley I chose to read; it was Dobie, in words about his birthplace, in an essay called "The Writer and His Land" which he contributed to the Southwest Review, that excellent quarterly published by Southern Methodist University Press at Dallas to which Dobie has served as a contributing editor for many years-words which seemed to me to sum up all his strength and devotion: "As rural life gives way to urban life and as mobility overcomes stability, human attachment to certain patches of the earth's surface becomes less common. Yet the potentiality of such attachment remains universal. It is very different from attachment to a country, a party, a church, a cause, a person, or any group of persons. It is behind much of patriotism. With some people it goes deeper than principles and embodies the profundity of life."

Flying out of Texas took even more time and change than flying in: a Pioneer DC-3 to San Angelo, thence a Trans-Texas DC-3 to El Paso and an American DC-6 connection, with stops at Pecos and Marfa-Alpine.

I thought a lot about J. Frank Dobie on that Lone Star odyssey, belted in the little thermal-bucking crafts, and I recognized that the biggest of all states has bred a man in proportion. Let the other forty-seven match him if they can.

A SELECTIVE LIST OF BOOKS BY J. FRANK DOBIE

Available new from bookstores. Some titles are also available in paper-back editions. Inquiry of the Southern Methodist University Press at Dallas will bring a priced list of Texas Folklore Society publications edited by Dobie.

Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Little, Brown. $3.00.

Coronado's Children. Grosset. $1.79.

Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Rev. & enl. ed. Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press. Cloth $3.50, Paper $2.50.

The Longhorns. Little, Brown. $6.00.

The Mustangs. Little, Brown. $6.00.

Tales of Old-Time Texas. Little, Brown. $5.00.

A Texan in England. Little, Brown. $4.00.

Tongues of the Monte. Little, Brown. $5.00.

A Vaquero of the Brush Country. Little, Brown. $5.00.

The Voice of the Coyote. Little, Brown. $5.00.

Land of the Sleping Rainbow BY JOYCE ROCKWOOD MUENCH PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSEF MUENCH

Under the guise of work, my husband and I have spent the last two decades scouting out and photographing beautiful places. You might say that we make a business of other people's vacations. We've been asked so often that we have the answer ready before the sentence is finished: "What area do you like best?" "The most wonderful area is where we've just been:"

So right now, although we're back home, reliving our adventures and enjoying our pictures, the grandest, most challenging country I can think of is in southeastern Utah, the fabulous and little known "Land of the Sleeping Rainbow."

You never heard the name? It's what the Navajo Indians call a most dramatic portion of the Colorado Plateau. It's where you'll find such enticing labels as the Circle Cliffs, Cathedrals in Stone, Capitol Reef, Valley of the Goblins, the majestic Henry Mountains (that are still growing). Within its borders are the Aquarius Plateau, with the highest forest in the world beginning at most peak's timberline and rising another thousand feet; the "Hondoo on the Muddy," in the San Rafael Swell; Utah's Grand Canyon, and weird Upheaval Dome. Yes, those and more than you could see in a dozen vacations all rolled into one.

Rainbows, I realize, are traditionally to be seen in the sky, with a pot of gold at their foot-if you can reach it. Today, the style even in rainbows has changed. Uranium hunters look for treasure where the many-colored bands of the Chinle shales spread over the ground, and every other formation has its brilliant tints. Whether he found "pay dirt" or not, the modern prospector has left a trail through some of the most gaily painted, fantastically shaped and eroded scenery on the globe. We can follow him into yesterday's remote and inaccessible corners to see amazing examples of Nature's handiwork.

Pick up a Utah state map and run your eyes over the southeastern corner, some twenty-thousand square miles, large enough to fit in two Rhode Islands, one New Jersey and a New Hampshire, with extra room for their irregular shapes without crowding. Your whole hand won't be big enough to cover the distance between U.S. highways bordering it. Yet, when you study a U.S. highway map, all roads seem to lead there.

At one side, linking Canada to Mexico, U.S. 89 connects with every east-west route and leads all Pacific slope roads to starting points near the Bryce Canyon National Park or at Sigurd. On the other side is U.S. 160, joining on the north with U.S. 6-50, fresh from crosscountry runs which begin along the Atlantic seaboard.

From Arizona, at the south, you have a choice of using U.S. 89 coming due north from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, or U.S. 66 (east to Gallup, New Mexico, and then upstate to U.S. 666 as far as 160 at Cortez, Colorado. The Monument Valley Road (through the Navajo Indian Reservation) offers an entrance over the San Juan River at Mexican Hat or the adventurous route by Ferry at Hite on the Colorado.

Railheads are at Sigurd, Utah, and Flagstaff, Arizona, on the west and southwest, and Green River, Utah, to the north.

For the airminded, there seems always to be a plane overhead, even when you may not see another car all day, and landing fields, from mere cleared strips to full-scale airports, are more numerous than post offices.

Along the approaching highways, fine little towns with modern motels and restaurants seem completely unaware of the exciting places you are heading for, but are glad to serve you. Within the magic circle itself are Torrey, Fruita, Hanksville, Boulder, Escalante and Moab to cater to your needs. You may spend your days in some of the most rugged scenery on earth and, if you so desire, be back to a white tablecloth at supper time. Next to what area is “best,” people most persistently want to know “when is the best time to go?” That’s easy to answer—“Whenever you can go, from early spring to the very end of Autumn.” There’s so much climate in the Land of the Sleeping Rainbow, that any month in nine will be ideal for some part of it. Since you can’t possibly see it all at once, perhaps next year you may come in another season.

Elevations vary from 3,480 feet above sea level at Hite on the Colorado to 12,500 feet on the Aquarius Plateau, making for many climates to choose from. In spring and early summer there will be flowers up high and the lowest desert stretches will be pleasantly cool. July and August bring heat to low-lying areas, but the finest kind of weather to great portions of the plateau lands. They also bring great thunderclouds, which photographers dote upon, and flashfloods in some of the canyons. Fall is crisp, with clear air, lovely color on the Aspens in the heights and later on Cottonwoods and Tamarisk in the canyons. November may close high roads with the first snow and then warm up to glorious weeks of a belated Indian summer. Then it is that mountains seventy miles away seem about to fall in your lap and the nippy nights put you right to sleep after a long day among the rainbows. After that-before you know-it's spring again.

Perhaps you've already noticed very few roads on the map inside the 100-mile-wide area between federal highways. Utah State 24 crosses from 89 to 6-50 and State 95 leaves it at Hanksville to meander southward. State 54 from Bryce Canyon serves Escalante and Boulder, merging into 117 over shoulders of the Aquarius Plateau to Torrey. The rest of the roads aren't on the map yet, because you can bulldoze a road faster than you can print it on a map. Don't blame local information for failing to include a route that wasn't there a month ago, or where only cattlemen or prospectors travel. But believe me, there are some wonderful roads in that country. Some are almost as spectacular as the scenery and for those, you will definitely need a four-wheel drive-and a guide.

On our adventures, we went in “Marilda,” a 4-wheel drive station wagon of acrobatic-contortionist abilities and personality-plus. She was put through her paces by Lurt Knee, only licensed guide in the area. We made his Pleasant Creek Ranch in Capitol Reef National Monument our headquarters, warming our toes before a roaring fire in his comfortable ranch house living room and listening to Hi-Fi before jumping into bed. Cradled among great walls of the Reef and perched on juniper-studded “Hogan Hill,” Sleeping Rainbow Lodge has magnificent views and as yet, limited accommodations. The Henry Mountains on the east watch it through the rift of Pleasant Creek Canyon and from a side window the Aquarius Plateau with its lofty forest can be glimpsed up a cut in Miners Mountain. Deer, porcupine and desert fox investigate the premises at night and no summer day is without its cooling breeze. Lurt has spent many years here, doing some farming, more prospecting and most-guiding. He has gathered a wealth of information about roads, geological formations and good jokes. He has a masterful technique with Marilda, who will do, at his command, everything except roll over (he discourages sharing) but you feel as safe as is a cradle, riding the most uncertain terrain. Perhaps this is because Ние окавий "I have had through previous lives, one of which is my own, in this car and I fer't intend to take any risks."

The motion wagon is sand whipped with away about - wave radio, and Lurt is a Civil Air Patrol operator, with the right to work for help, as well as rondse it, whenever he may be.

I would venture to say that no other person in the region knows more about its hidden scenic treasures or has more enthusiasm for every mile of it. After κατά enable experience with a Geiger-counter (and special dust-pan and probe which he invented and perfected) Lurt has concluded that hunting scenery is more rewarding than man hunt-prospecting. We owe much of our own admiration for the country to trips made with him starting at ghaw angil baze (whines doivetits a week one markal "wla Tarrey, Utah") at Pleasant Creek Ranch.

Take CAMUELE CaxS When Lant first took us into the Circle Oiffs, several years ago, we wem probably the first perty to pas the great Wingate andare cuneat and drop into the manded dome of Buer Flat, jon for the fon of in. There were "ways" to get in but no roads med os inicis, the car know as much shout whare to gu se we did. Now, with a bow to azumiem-susechers, then go twu ontruin by road and oos.cxit (only) by canyon.

What might be considered the front door to the ex-alusive Cirde in the Burr Trail, breaching the eastern rim. It climbs over ther Waterpocket Fold frun a well travelul rond that jeiss Noron, on State 34, a few miles cast of Capitol Reaf National Mamment The Barr Trail was only that, a few years ago, # dificult horse path witchburidag up a micky cuntyo wall. When uwuniora a deelded on making a road of it, old-timera donk thekt heads word said it nooddu't be done. Now it's a thrilling sight as it mounts or un, angle, taxes and goes back-climbing every inch of the way. wanderful view looking east to the Henry Mountains le achieved with new sampective en aach rising level.

If the irregular cliffs, cut into shapes beyond all categories, Plaguing, were not enough for the visitor, the Black Forests, would daw people as bees to humsy to this rocidsund panadise. For a oferateristic of the Chiols and Solairump formations is the presease of perified trees which grew. in swastpy inwiends, around iso million years ago. On that flest trip with Lurn, we "discovered and named taren separatu "forests" of them. They is on slopes, in gullies and solllag down the hilbides. Some were giants of g primeval forest, rgo feer in height (or sa the portified Ferments comsure alve feer tall at une aide and ten for througla at the base. Other, waly slightly kaw magnificent speckans be athwart each other, sa in a dried-up millpunud. Sarawuta Loom thhable size to immovable sections, are jue emerging from their clay blaakies.

The exit to the Circle Cliffs leaven Buer Flat by a channel through which a goodly share of a mouихайл (once sanding shove the fat) was carried away. It's not zeally a road but one of the mor spearsonier exayin trips which the Coloreda Platem offers. Fall is particulisty irrely through Silver Falls Camyan. The tiny car works it way down rock carridors with cliffs shore sweeping la ovirhanga, enrving back in vaderents whose sun never penetrates dark sepa, fringed by ferns. From a shadowed roan we rolled into guest golden amphitheatres. Iomense ald cuttarwoods drupe their irregular, dark-ridged trusle mad heavy branches with golden leaves through which the afternoon san filtered. Reflected light from the alités filled the spacious charbers and we watched reflections of high. domus and marveled at the weathering-painted on cross-bedded Navaja andmone.

Silver Falls Scully comes kus the Canyon of the Escalante River and a Heide downstream from the fort, Haris Canyon estas providing a convenient condona tion of the rents, laclining goutly, the gorge is quite as drsmark and overwhaholng sa the earlier miles. A small pecennial stream must be crossed and recomend thuong vust rooms and past desp caves, where pashistoric Indians bilt small h The town of Escabean Hes a few miles beyond thre esnyon head. Once there, the parensent of State 14, tise modera motok, and a good dixier as a cafe maka the tis day's

Experiences in the Carole Cliffs seem completely uncosi. An easy day's trip leads south from Escalante to Kodachrome Flat and the graceful Grosvenor Arch. Both ephemeral and unique in their way, they are always in demand for the camera fan.

The return can be made through the town of Boulder, which until now was a "patch-house town" without road access, Into the Cheela Cliffs via wonderful views from Lang Canyon Point to the western rim, and out over the Burr Trail This is always open as a through-route if a summer storm should make the canyon ride temporarily inadvisable or fall snow shuts the high road over Fry. But, for an illustrating overview of the Circle, you will want to climb to the fenka of Boulder Mountain on the way to Torrey.

This is a reviewing stand for the march of events which cover more of geologic time than the spectator can easily grasp. The Aquarius Plateau, on which we are (Boulder Mountain is the local name for this portion of the plateau), is one of the region's great headlands, visible for miles in any direction. The 40 square miles on top is the zenith of a vast surface that once stood much higher and touched south and east of the present Green and Colorado Rivers, Since landscapes are never the static affairs we take them to be, profound changes have come with the centuries, as erosion has torn at the highlands, We look down into the ruins of a mountain, once mounded up to 13,000 feet, a vanished neighbor of the Aquarius, the existence of which was first described by the geologists. Its volcanic cap was split open and its own streams devoured the rocks, chewing them up and spitting them into a maze of dissected canyons. The Escalante River is still concerned with carrying off debris, delivering it to the Colorado River to be scattered clear to the Gulf of California. All that is left here is a great ellipse of citadels standing like the edges of a broken and empty eggshell. You can cross the domed basin they guard to the white cones of the Henry Mountains, beyond.

At the foot of the cliffs sweep the Sleeping Rainbow - one of the largest and finest displays of the Chinle formation in the whole region. There are purples and yellows, lavenders and pinks, lilac, ash gray, red, blue and brown. The great geologist, Herbert Gregory, says of the colored bands: "Their wide expanse, their brilliant coloring and fantastic weathering makes them an exceeding scenic feature, even in a region where much rock is highly colored and eroded into picturesque forms"

CaxmEURALE IN BONE

About a different scene you can imagine from the leader Rocks are southeastern Utah's Cathedrals in Stone. They spread out at the base of the Capitol Reef's eastern slopes and the near Thousand Lake Mountain. It's quite an experience to look down on them from grassy slopes high in the national forest, with aspen groves at your back. From about ten thousand feet to mid several thousand more feet of elevation, thely fine effect is of pattern in color.

A Rocky Mountain Mule Deer may come out of a thicket nearby and the breeze blowing down from the tops has the smell of a hidden lake, while down below is the Unseat. Not a desert of sand dunes, but a rocky place, but into seemingly level basins, sharply defined by irregular walls which almost turn creosoteamed oxalet, ali likes and individual paradigms. I say blossom, because the ridges have a flowered look from that distance, ornate as a painting and suggesting fine detail traced on varying Levels.

To see those Stones alhors as though you might wander w Cathedral close for a potter and that it would be possible, with little trouble, to travel by car from end to end of the parade of formations. You can be farther deluded into thinking that without undue pioneering, pictures might be taken of every phantom in the canon of a single day. We found it otherwise. The clear air has a habit of con-

Founding the best judge of distance and we spent on a hot-summer number of days just becoming patterned with the three asin a thur South Desert, the Upper and the Lower Cathedrals. Each is art in its own basin, separated from the next by no inconsiderable ridges. There is individuality in each grouping, wiry within a general design, fashioned frames e a specific portion of Entrada sandFrom desert approaches, less clearly defined and painted, or from the cool woodland heights, the Cathedrals are quite a change in scenery. The "Temple of the Sun," the "Moon," the "Stars" and other features supplied with equally fanciful names (people begin naming these shapes before the car door is open) do light up the imagination. You may have alternate suggestions for "Mom and Pop" or "Little Henry" among these gracious shapes. But when the inevitable road is pushed into the South Desert, surely "The Steeple" will be the joy of every camerahound. We reached it after three days of determined reconnoitering around the edges, and finally arrived by sheer will-power, through a boulder-strewn wash in time to catch the late light on this towering, winged edifice, with the moon peering over its right shoulder, as it posed for its first picture.

THE GOBLINS

Not very far from the Cathedrals, as the crow flies, but like a plunge from the sublime to the ridiculous, is the Valley of the Goblins. The name tells you what to expect, but no one is ever prepared for the limits to which Nature will go for a laugh. Neither grass nor any other selfrespecting plant lives there. It's just Entrada sandstone and clay, baked to pavement hardness with thousands upon thousands of silly, slightly malicious characters assembled around courtyards. Even the Entrada is different from the soft modeling of the Cathedrals. This is harder, worn by wind and water into rounded, bulgy, grotesque curves.

There are Donald Ducks, flying turtles, trick-performing seals (On Seal Beach), Pop-Eye, the Parade of the Bedbugs and the Conference of the Woodchucks. Up Goofy Gulch, more faces stare balefully and from a clifftop, you can look down on busy Times Square, crowded with foolish figures.

The faces are individual, to say the least, sometimes casually possessing only one eye or three, with misplaced noses and extra chins. Wimpy, the Dwarf, broods disconsolately, huge nose on what passes for a chin, and a mammoth Puppy, standing ten feet tall, begs for a tidbit. The Kings Men, or Three Musketeers occupy a roomy platform at the outskirts, evidently trying to scare off visitors but convulsing them with laughter instead.

All of this is very funny, much more so than a description can convey. There is further, especially when the sun hides behind a cloud, a slightly sinister atmosphere. I had the distinct sensation several times, that one of the Goblins behind me had moved. It was just a flicker of movement, caught out of the corner of my eye, and he was back in position when I whirled to face him. I wondered if there were not a glimmer of some emotion in his deepset eye-sockets. No one will admit to having seen it, but I rather suspect that on Hallowe'en-at midnight-there may be something going on in the Valley of the Goblins-and I'm not sure that it would be good.

The setting of these weird figures is another gem of placement. Lapped by dunes of the Greenriver Desert but screened from view by a great ledge, it looks south to the

NOTES FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS ALONG THE CAMERA TRAIL IN THE LAND OF THE SLEEPING RAINBOW WITH JOSEF MUENCH OPPOSITE PAGE

"MONUMENT CANYON." Suspended on ledges, somewhere between the deep cut Colorado River and its expansive upper rim in Utah's Grand Canyon, is this gem of a side gorge, about 600 feet from white rim rock to the irregular floor, dotted with pinnacles. A graceful window shows at the right and the Abajo Mtns. (The Blues) lie on the horizon. November 17, at about 4 p.m. Taken with a Linhof Camera with 15 inch Xenar lens on 4x5 Ektachrome, daylight film. ½ second at f.16 with Polaroid filter.

"VIEW FROM GRAND VIEW POINT." Looking down some 2500 feet from this ultimate of all view points on the Colorado River, the several finger gorge with its White Rim Rock edging, the visitor can see windows, bridges, totem poles carved from rock. The overlook is 34 miles from U.S. 160, between Green River and Moab, Utah. Taken with a Linhof Camera with a 6-inch Xenar lens on 4x5 Ektachrome daylight film. second at f.18. October 22nd at about 3 p.m.

"DEAD HORSE POINT, UTAH." Some 3000 feet below this lofty point of rock, jutting out into Utah's Grand Canyon is the winding Colorado River, with tiers of buttes and ledges rising above it in the familiar Grand Canyon style of architecture. But here the onlooker seems close to the mighty panorama, painted in every imaginable shade of red. Taken with a Linhof Camera with 6-inch Xenar lens on 4x5 Ektachrome daylight film. 1/50 at f.8. At about 11 o'clock on the morning of Oct. 22. The overlook is 23 miles from U.S. 160 on a road turning off between Green River and Moab, Utah.

"ALONG THE SHAFER TRAIL, UTAH." Dropping from the canyon Rim (about 18 miles from U.S. 160) this former horse trail, now a cleverly engineered road, switchbacks down a cliff of some 1000 feet to wander along ledges in a wilderness of canyons. At the left, Dead Horse Point rises. The La Sal Mtns. appear in the distance. Taken with a Linhof Camera with 6-inch Xenar lens at second f.14. On 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film with haze filter. About 3 p.m. Nov. 17."

"AUTUMN ON THE FREMONT." Squaw Skirt Mesas in Elephant Gray stand in the background, across the rutted river bed with a fringe of Cottonwood trees in brilliant autumn dress trimming Utah State 24 as it passes on its way between Capitol Reef Nat'l Mon. and Hanksville, Utah. Taken with a Graphic View Camera with 6" Ektar lens. 1½ sec. at f.25 on 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film. Taken in late October in the early afternoon.

CENTER PANEL

"IN THE CIRCLE CLIFFS, SOUTHERN UTAH." Standing on the west rim of a great ellipse where a mountain once filled this vast space, rising above its base of Wingate sandstone that make a 1500-foot rim about the area. The Chinle formation-The Sleeping Rainbow, shows its dark shades, spreading down toward the rugged center of the basin, through which a road can be seen wandering. Beyond the farther rim are the lofty Henry Mountains which are growing at the rate of an inch a year. View from long point. Taken with a Linhof Camera-8% Tessar lens on 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film 1.25 sec. at f.14 about noon in the middle of November.

"VALLEY OF THE GOBLINS." From a clay overlook, thousands

Myriad of odd characters seem bustling about or waiting for a street-car. Shaped by erosion from red Entrada Sandstone, they are the grotesque inhabitants of this fantastic valley, perhaps 16 miles from Hanksville, Utah, reached by a turnoff from State 24. Taken with a Graphic View Camera-54-inch Tessar Lens. 1½ sec. at f.32 on 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film with a haze filter. At about 3 p.m. in August.

Among the weird sights this Utah Valley offers the photographer, this bird on a perch looks like a different species from every angle but the creature nearby looks like a turtle about to take off. Wind and water through centuries have shaped the Entrada sandstone to comic figures. Taken with a Graphic View Camera with 84Goerz Dagor lens, 1/5 second at f.22 on 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film and sky filter, at about 3 p.m. in August.

"THE KING'S MEN, VALLEY OF THE GOBLINS." On their

On a high rock platform these saucy fellows seem placed to guard the kingdom of strange characters and are almost frightening in appearance. The one at the right however, turn his nose skyward in complete unconcern. Taken with a Graphic View Camera, 54inch Zeiss Tessar lens, on 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film. About 10 a.m. in August.

"UPPER CATHEDRAL VALLEY." One of three basins in which

Nature has fashioned beautiful cathedral-like mesas and buttes. They stand in long rides or alone, banded with colors and ornately decorated. (See map with article.) Taken with a 4x5 Linhof Camera with 84-inch Tessar Lens. 1/50 at f.11 on daylight Ektachrome film about 1 p.m., late in November.

"GROSVENOR ARCH, SOUTHERN UTAH." A beautifully

A sculptured arch with ornamentation and delicate colors to enhance its effect as it stands high above a valley south of Henriville. It is 152 feet tall with a 99 foot span. Named for president National Geographic Society. Taken with a Linhof Camera and 6-inch Xenar lens on 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film at 1/25th, f.16. In the middle of the afternoon, in late November. (See map with article.)

"IN CAPITOL REEF NATIONAL MONUMENT." A portion

The great reef standing over one of the major fault lines of the Colorado Plateau has obviously been lifted and then eroded. Tiers of cliffs stand out, visibly tilted from their original horizontal position and carved into elaborate and splendid faces. (See map with article.) Linhof Camera, 6-inch Xenar lens. 1/10 second at f.11. 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film. The time was late afternoon, about 5 o'clock on a November day.

OPPOSITE PAGE "STANDING STUMP IN THE CIRCLE CLIFFS." Standing 12

A feet tall in its higher remnant and 10 feet through at the base, this petrified tree was alive perhaps 150 million years ago. Its wood or stone has a reddish look and if it proves to have grown where it stands, is an added rarity. All around it are Demoiselles-wearing headdresses of sandstone, part of the strangeness of the Black Forests of the Circle Cliffs in Utah. (See map with article.) Taken with a Graphic View Camera, 84-inch Goerz Dagor lens, 1/50th at f.16 about 4 p.m. in October. 4x5 daylight Ektachrome film.

Peaks of the Henry Mountains, which part of the year offer a snow-rimmed skyline. Wild Horse Mesa is to the west, named for bands of "lost horses" which have escaped roundups, and 1000 Lake Mountain lifts beyond in forested heights.

The Valley, really a running series of basins, must be explored on foot and continues southward into more humorous courtyards which have probably never been fully explored. Perhaps as an anti-climax, one might say that however "frightening" these baleful monsters may seem, they are really the ones who should be scared-not people. Many of the Toadstools and frantically funny figures are delicately balanced and can be destroyed by thoughtless climbing or pushing. We approach the Goblins with increasing trepidation on each visit. How long will these fragile, story-book comics be able to hold their own against-not the ravages of weather-but of admiring visitors?

CAPITOL REEF NATIONAL MONUMENT

In choosing Pleasant Creek Ranch for headquarters, we never had far to go for remarkable scenery since we were already in the very heart of one of southeastern Utah's finest sections. The Capitol Reef, a monument since 1937, but little known and almost totally unappreciated, is on State 24, reached from Torrey on the west and the towns of Green River and Hanksville on the east.

Fruita, within the monument, stands shut in by cliffs along the Fremont River, in the shade of old cottonwoods. A few houses among fruit orchards, a lodge with modern accommodations and public dining room, a small motel, store and gas pump make up the town.

Visible along the highway, for miles before and after reaching Fruita, the Reef projects into the sky. It is part of the Waterpocketfold which runs 150 miles through the country from Thousand Lake Mountain to the Colorado River. The twenty-mile portion, within the monument is breached by just three canyons that of the Fremont, Capitol Gorge, and Pleasant Creek, cutting through its seven-mile width. The ascending layers of Moencopi, Chinle, Wingate and capping domes of Navajo (from which a resemblance to the Washington Capitol has inspired the name) were originally horizontal sedimentary formations. They were lifted by one of the major faults of the Colorado Plateau and tilted before erosion set to work carving out the Wingate "Castle" and Moencopi "Egyptian Temple" and "Mummy Cliffs" that decorate the cliff faces. This slant to the east is so pronounced that, as one drives through the area, particularly through Capitol Gorge, the landscape seems to be sliding underground. A layer, which at one place soars overhead, is, perhaps a few miles farther on, already underground.

Lunt Knee pointed out this fascinating phenomenon to us and took us out in the late afternoon to see the dramatic play of late light on the ramparts, when they glow with fire. He took us, as well, on unmarked roads to hidden spots-Maverick Draw, the secret haunt of deer; Steer Point overlooking lovely Tantalus Basin; seldom seen Valentine Arch, and an unnamed span on a massive sloping slick-rock wall. These are spots the visitor should see in addition to the profound cut of the Fremont River gorge, Grand Wash, pictographs along Pleasant Creek, and the highway route through Capitol Gorge. State 24 shares the canyon with the stream bed, pinched in to a close 18 feet at one spot, above which the walls rise through the Wingate to Navajo battlements before opening onto the desert and a magnificent view of the Henry Mountains across slopes awash with color and punctuated in the middle distance by the “Elephant Gray-Navajo skirts” of the Caineville Mesas.

THE HENRY MOUNTAINS

These peaks had overlooked us from outlooks on Boulder and Thousand Lake Mountain, from the Goblins and the rim of the Circle Cliffs as well as within the Capitol Reef. We seemed never to escape their scrutiny. Like publicity-seeking politicians, they had managed to get into any picture of the region. It was inevitable that we would some day have to see what these handsome skyline giants looked like, close at hand.

Cattle and hunting roads push up into them and a new one, probably inspired by prospectors now goes over them, coming down on the Hanksville or eastern side. No doubt even Mt. Ellen, the highest peak (11,485) has been climbed by some ambitious geologist. For the Henrys are considered among the most interesting of mountain masses. I wouldn't try to give a technical explanation of what a laccolith is, but as I understand what happened here-sedimentary layers were pushed up from within by a certain kind of volcanic action, unattended by the usual fanfare of visible explosion or lava flow. It is claimed that the Henrys are still growing-at the rate of an inch a year. To prophecy an American Vesuvius, sometime, or that in the year 16,956 A.D. we will have a Mt. Everest in Utah, would be strictly unscientific conjecture-but you might want to figure it in as a calculated risk in one of your future insurance policies.

Certain it is, however, that beside the sandstone, shales, and comglomerates found thereabouts, the Henry Mountains contain volcanic intrusions. They occurred, evidently, when the Colorado River had achieved mastery over the drainage system of the region. Like humps in a blanket, which would slide moisture around their base, the Henrys have made the Fremont River swing in a wide arc around the north side to follow a trough between the mountains and the San Rafael Swell.

The Layman will not be able to see any of this exciting inner activity, but will enjoy great open stretches with flocks of sheep looking like white boulders on its slopes, the fragrant pine woods and bulky shoulders through which the road ascends. He will see many big Mule Deer and possibly some of the Buffalo that range there. Distant views are tremendous with whole oceans of rocky canyons and desolate desert valleys. Southward, the black hum of Navajo Mountain pushes into the skyline, and close to long purple shadowed mesas of Northern Arizona, project the pinnacles of Monument Valley.

The Henrys are a little stand-offish, but they appeal in quite different ways to many people. To cattle and sheep men they mean rangeland, and to the Nimrod-excellent hunting grounds. The geologist thinks of them as laccolithic, but to the photographer, they are pre-eminently and most satisfyingly-scenic. Yes, they are beautiful mountains.

THE SAN RAFAEL SWELL

There was another natural feature which had intrigued us on earlier trips, as we drove south from the town of Green River to Hanksville. It was to the west of the road, a great wave of rock, cut now and again by dark gashes and as irregularly lined as a topographical map. It rolled and heaved on the skyline. We knew its name-the San Rafael Swell, a rugged, little known and inaccessible empire of rock and canyons-no place for a tourist.

How amazing then to have Lurt tell us that he could take trips through it. Within the last few years it has been probed for its minerals and where cattle thiefs had been sure of a retreat beyond the arm of the law, there are now several immensely rich uranium mines, complete with trailer cities and power.

Before taking us, Lurt confessed that it was here he had become a “big geologist”-because there are more “By Golly's” in the San Rafael Swell than almost any other place he knows. I agree with him after seeing it. Nowhere -no, not even in the Grand Canyon of Arizona, have I been more impressed by sheer size and form of rock formations. Anyone who thinks the canyons of the Southwest are, after all, pretty much alike (just high walls and a dry, or wet, stream running through) has never ventured into the Muddy, the Buckhorn, the San Rafael or Red Canyons in the San Rafael Swell. It's difficult to photograph them and quite impossible to describe their effect. I remember the dramatic introduction to the Swell, from State 24 and through the Pinto Hills to a sweeping outlook over the Dead World. We had just passed a

good gravel road pushes out to a view overlooking the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon of Utah. At least 3000 feet below (and I suspect it's more) is the brown river, set in the familar but always impressive architecture of tiered cliffs and connecting talus slopes. What an outlook-mountain edged and full of red tones. The river is much closer than in the Arizona Grand Canyon and its meanderings are therefore more striking. We had been there several months before and had noticed, to our utter amazement, that a road wormed along, far below us, on one of the great benches. Now we were back with a 4-wheel drive to follow it. So instead of turning to Dead Horse Point, we continued for a few miles to the Shafer Trail Road. It was well graded and soon dropped onto a ledge, hugging the cliffs for several miles before finding a jumping-off place. Like the Burr Trail in the Circle Cliffs, of which it reminded us, this was only wide enough for a horseback rider (if he were bold enough to stay in the saddle on the hazardous path) until uranium interests converted it. Much blasting and engineering know-how has produced a fine set of hair-raising switchbacks. We proceeded cautiously, not because of any lack of width, but out of wholesome respect for the sheer drops.

We reached "bottom" 2500 feet below on a bench that runs, to our knowledge, for at least 35 miles (road miles). Overhead was the soaring rim, and always close by as we headed one canyon after another, the White Rim which can be seen so clearly from up on top. It is a singular edging, marking the exposed edge of Cutler sandstone, which, at this geologic moment, is being eaten away in a most fantastic fashion. How many embayments of cliffs we followed, coming back each time almost to the main canyon wall, and then out again toward the edge of the bench, we lost count. Each canyon we headed was a little different from the others but cut in strikingly similar patterns. And how many more benches and drops down was the Colorado River, we could not see. There is a thrill, not found quite anywhere else, in being with a small party, alone in the vast desertcanyon country. The air is so still, the rocks seem to be holding their breath. An airplane engine, piercing the quiet with its engine, only acentuates it. Age-old barriers of rock shut out the rest of the world where time is measured in minutes and hours. Here the cliff faces respond only to the slow pulse of centuries. As our angle and direction shifted, we could pick out the walls that form Dead Horse Point in one direction and the distant Grand View Point in another. Sometimes our skyline was the tops of the La Sal Mountains to the east and then it was the Abajo Mountains to the south. In one side canyon we discovered a lovely window, formed by the stone figure of a woman, over 5 hundred feet high, resting her elbow on a rock table with an Indian Buck standing nearby. Our name for it is the Squaw Window, and it ranks in memory among the unexpected masterpieces of the canyon lands.

Our goal was the fabulous Monument Canyon, one of the company whose rim we had been skirting for hours, but the most exciting of them all. At least 600 feet deep from its White Rim capping, it breaks into a deep red formation with individual pedestals, pylons, arches just under the heavy sandstone top, and an intricate system of inner gullies and ridges.

The moon was coming up over the La Sals and the sun disappearing behind the mesa which ends in Grand View Point, so we headed "home" to Moab. The trip back around the canyon-heads and up the Shafer Trail is one none of us will soon forget. I noticed that even sure-footed Marilda staid well over from the edge as she switchbacked up. The drop below looked more fearsome than the black well of an elevator shaft-it seemed bottomless. Next day we followed another road on the plateau, marked "For 4-wheel Drive only" which lead us west to Upheaval Dome. It has been called the "most unusual geologic feature in Southern Utah." Quite a statement, but equally, quite a place. It's a crater-like hole, two miles wide, rimmed by red sandstone and filled with twisted and contorted forms in brilliant colors. It's hard to believe, let alone to squeeze onto film. Something very violent must have happened in this sandstone setting, and recently enough so that great tongues of material come up in sharp peaks and angle back down, with vertical stripes like those of a marble cake. The last word in views of the canyon lands is Grand View Point, 34 miles from U.S. 160, and reached by the "Neck." This 40-foot ridge between deep gorges (dropping on one side toward the Colorado River and on the other to the Green River) has a fence and gate across it, effectively shutting in 40,000 acres. Beyond is Gray's Pasture and Grand View Point. What else could you call it? To the north you can see the Roan Cliffs, to the east, the full spread of the La Sals, with the Abajos standing up on the south and off to the southwest, our familiar Henry Mountains. Below is the world of Monument Canyon and its neighbors, the fantastic Needles, across the Colorado River, and the whole wonderful, immense and complicated complex of cliffs, canyons, buttes and platforms. The words begin to tumble and get as confused as the landscape is. As we stood on that awesome rim and watched the moon rise, to light its towers and flash on the waters of the Colorado and the invisible but potent Green, we reminded ourselves that there is no scenery like this anywhere else in the world, but on the Colorado Plateau. And we bowed again to the cattleman and the prospector who have so conveniently opened the secret passages into all this once inaccessible country and pointed the way to the Land of the Sleeping Rainbow.