* Ray Stannard Baker, Century Magazine, May, 1902.

The Grand Canyon may be likened to an inverted mountain range.  Imagine a great mountain chain cast upside down in plaster.  Then all the former ridges and spurs of the range become tributary canyons and gulches running back twenty or thirty miles into the surrounding country, growing shallower and shallower as the distance increases from the central core, just as the great spurs and ridges of a mountain range, descending, melt finally into the plain.  Often there are parts where the central gorge is narrow and precipitous, just as a mountain range frequently possesses mighty precipices.  But it is an error to think of great canyons as mere slits in the ground, dark and gloomy, like a deep well from whose depths stars may be sighted at midday.  Minor canyons sometimes approach this character, as, for example, the canyon of the upper Virgen, called Parunuweap, fifteen hundred feet deep and no more than twenty to thirty feet wide, with vertical walls, but I have never been in a canyon from which stars were visible in daylight, nor have I ever known anyone who had.  The light is about the same as that at the bottom of a narrow street flanked by very high buildings.  The walls may sometimes be gloomy from their colour, or may seem so from the circumstances under which one views them, but aside from the fact that any deep, shut-in valley or canyon may become oppressive, there is nothing specially gloomy about a deep canyon.  The sun usually falls more or less in every canyon, no matter how narrow or deep.  It may fall to the very bottom most of the day, or only for an hour or two, depending on the trend of the canyon with reference to the sun’s course.  At the bottom of the Kanab where it joins the Grand, the sunlight in November remains in the bottom just two hours, but outside in the main gorge the time is very much longer.

The walls of a great canyon, and usually a small one, are terraced; seldom are they wholly vertical for their entire height, though occasionally they may approach this condition on one side or the other, and more rarely on both sides at once, depending on the geological formations of the locality.  Owing to the immense height of the walls of such canyons as those on the Colorado, the cliffs frequently appear perpendicular when they are far from it, just as a mountain peak often seems to tower over one’s head when in reality it may be a considerable distance off.  In the nature of the formation and development of canyons, they could not long retain continuous vertical walls.  What Powell calls the “recession of cliffs” comes into play.  The erosive and corrasive power of water being the chief land sculptors, it is evident that there will be a continual wearing down of the faces of the bounding cliffs.  The softer beds will be cut away faster than the harder, and where these underlie the harder the latter will be undermined and fall.  Every canyon is always