Cape Desolation, a point of the Painted Desert on the west side of the Little Colorado, was almost directly above us, 3200 feet high.  Chuar Butte, equally as high and with walls just as nearly perpendicular, extended on into the Grand Canyon on the right side, making the narrowest canyon of this depth that we had seen.  The Navajo reservation terminated at the Little Colorado, although nothing but the maps indicated that we had passed from the land of the Red man to that of the White.  Both were equally desolate, and equally wonderful.  With the entrance of the new stream the canyon changes its southwest trend and turns directly west, and continues to hold to this general direction until the northwest corner of Arizona is reached.

But we must be on again!  Soon familiar segregated peaks in the Grand Canyon began to appear.  There was Wotan’s Throne on the right, and the “Copper Mine Mesa” on the left.  Three or four miles below the junction a four-hundred foot perpendicular wall rose above us.  The burro, on our previous visit, was almost shoved off that cliff when the pack caught on a rock, and was only saved by strenuous pulling on the neck-rope and pack harness.  Soon we passed some tunnels on both sides of the river where the Mormon miners had tapped a copper ledge.  At 4.15 P.M. we were at the end of the Tanner Trail, the outlet of the Little Colorado Trail to the rim above.  It had taken seven hours of toil to cover the same ground we now sped over in an hour and a quarter.  Major Powell, in 1872, found here the remnant of a very small hut built of mesquite logs, but whether the remains of an Indian’s or white man’s shelter cannot be stated.  The trail, without doubt was used by the Indians before the white man invaded this region.

The canyon had changed again from one which was very narrow to one much more complex, greater, and grander.  The walls on top were many miles apart; Comanche Point, to our left, was over 4000 feet above us; Desert View, Moran Point, and other points on the south rim were even higher.  On the right we could see an arch near Cape Final on Greenland Point, over 5000 feet up, that we had photographed, from the top, a few years before.  Pagoda-shaped temples—­the formation so typical of the Grand Canyon—­clustered on all sides.  The upper walls were similar in tint to those in Marble Canyon, but here at the river was a new formation; the algonkian, composed of thousands of brilliantly coloured bands of rock, standing at an angle—­the one irregularity to the uniform layers of rock—­a remnant of thousands of feet of rock which once covered this region, then was planed away before the other deposits were placed.  All about us, close to the river, was a deep, soft sand formed by the disintegration of the rocks above, as brilliantly coloured as the rocks from which they came.  What had been a very narrow stream above here spread out over a thousand feet wide, ran with a good current, and seemed to be anything but a shallow stream at that.