Arizona weekly miner., 1874-06-05
UTAH, COLORADO AND ARIZONA.
4 Region cf Canyons and Gorges.

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 Major J. w. Powell read paper at the recent meeting of the Academy of Science giving an count of the progress made in the survey of the Colorado River and its tributaries by parties un- der the direction of the Smithsonian Institute, from which we make the following extracts:
 The whole region embraced in the survey is canon country At the very beginning we have a series of c3nons through the Uintah Mountains, as the channel of Green river, Flaming Gorge, kinghsher's canon, Red canon, the canon of Lo- dore, Whirlpool canon. and Split Mountain can ons. Then Tampa canon, the canon along the lower course of the river of the same name, and many other tributary canons. Then below, in descending the river, the canon of Dissolution, Gray canon, Labyrinth canon, and Saltwater can on, with their laterals; then Cataract canon, a profound chasm below the junction of the Grand and Green, then Narrow canon, which terminates at the mouth of the Dirty Devil river; many can ons lateral in all these have also been explored.
 Then Glen canon, a beautiful chasm carved by the river in the bright red homogeneous sand stone of Triassc age From the mouth of the Paria river to the mouth of the Colorado Chi quito is the beautiful gorge to which have given the name of Marble canon. The walls of limestone, and near the foot are of a crystal line structure which receives a beautiful polish; white gray, slate color, pink, bsown and saffron colored marbles are here found, carved and fret ted by the waves of the river, and polished by the floods of sand which are poured over the walls of the eanons, which have assumed archi- tectural forms on giant scale m appearance of great beauty and grandeur.
 Then we have the Grand canon, the most pro- found chasm known on the globe. Were hun dred mountains, each as large as Mt. Washing ton, plucked up by the roots to the level of the sea and tumbled into the gorge, they would not fill it.
 Perhaps the most wonderful of the topograph- ic features of this country the lines of cliffs, escarpments of rock separating upper from low CT regions by bold, often vertical and impossible barriers, hundreds or thousands of feet high and scores or hundreds of miles in length. l will ennTerate some of the more important First, we have the Brown cliffs, an escarpment which forms the southern boundary of the plateau through which the canon of Desolation is carved then the Azure cliffs the southern escarpmcnt of the plateau through which Gray canon is cut; then the Grange cliffs, a broken escarpment, which commences at the foot of the Sierra La Sal on the eastern side of Grand river, past the Grand, then across the Green river, and then down in q southwesterly direction parallel to the again to the southeast, and crosses the Colorado, terminating in the slope of the Sierra La Sal, two or three scores of miles south of the initial point. Thus the head oi the Colorado, the junction of the Grand and Green, is encompassed by a tow ering wall-the Sierra La Salon the east; on the northwest and south the Orange cliffs on every side facade of storm carved rocks is pre- sented. The Indian name for this basin is Tam pun tCU IleiT tt-iceap, the land of standing rocks. Buttes, towers, pnacles, thousands and tens of thousands strange forms of rock, naked rock of many different coors here seen so that be- fore We had learned the Indian name we thought Of calling it the Stone Forest or Painted Stone piles of irregular masses, but standing forms, carved by the rain drops from the solid massive beds. Weird, strange and grand is the Tim-pin icl-neir tl- iceap.