The year following the Ives expedition, Captain Macomb (1859) was sent to examine the junction of the Green and Grand rivers.  For a considerable distance he followed, from Santa Fe, almost the same trail that Escalante had travelled eighty-three years previously.  Dr. Newberry, the eminent geologist who had been with Ives, was one of this party, and he has given an interesting account of the journey.  The region lying immediately around the place they had set out for is one of the most formidable in all the valley of the Colorado.  Looking about one there, from the summit of the canyon walls, it seems an impossibility for anything without the power of flight to approach the spot except by way of the river channels.  Macomb and Newberry succeeded in forcing their way to within about six miles of the junction, there to be completely baffled and turned back.  Arriving finally at the brink of the canyon of Grand River, Newberry says: 

“On every side we were surrounded by columns, pinnacles, and castles of fantastic shapes, which limited our view, and by impassable canons, which restricted our movements.  South of us, about a mile distant, rose one of the castle-like buttes, which I have mentioned, and to which, though with difficulty, we made our way.  This butte was composed of alternate layers of chocolate-colored sandstone and shale about one thousand feet in height; its sides nearly perpendicular, but most curiously ornamented with columns and pilasters, porticos and colonnades, cornices and battlements, flanked here and there with tall outstanding towers, and crowned with spires so slender that it seemed as though a breath of air would suffice to topple them from their foundations.  To accomplish the object for which we had come so far, it seemed necessary that we should ascend this butte.  The day was perfectly clear and intensely hot, the mercury standing at 92 degrees in the shade, and the red sandstone, out of which the landscape was carved, glowed in the heat of the burning sunshine.  Stripping off nearly all our clothing, we made the attempt, and, after two hours of most arduous labor, succeeded in reaching the summit.  The view which there burst upon us was such as amply repaid us for all our toil.  It baffles description.”

He goes on to say that, while the great canyon, meaning the Grand Canyon, with its gigantic cliffs, presents grander scenes, they have less variety and beauty of detail than this.  They were here able to see over an area of some fifty miles diameter, where, hemmed in by lines of lofty step-like mesas, a great basin lay before them as on a map.  There was no vegetation, “nothing but bare and barren rocks of rich and varied colours shimmering in the sunlight.  Scattered over the plain were thousands of the fantastically formed buttes to which I have referred . . . pyramids, domes, towers, columns, spires of every conceivable form and size.”  There were also multitudes of canyons, ramifying in every direction, “deep, dark, and ragged, impassable to everything but the winged bird.”  At the nearest point was the canyon of the Grand, while four miles to the south another great gorge was discerned joining it, which their Amerind guides pronounced to be that of Green River.  Finding it utterly impossible for them to reach this place, they returned.