Part 8 (2/2)
If it had not been that the season was verging on the summer rains, which flood the Little Colorado, we should have gone on from Oraibi to the Grand Canon. But the Little Colorado is full of quicksands, dangerous to a span of a generous host's horses; so we came back the way we had entered. As we drove down the winding trail that corkscrews from Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women came running down the footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa.
”We love you,” exclaimed an old woman extending her hand (the Government doctor interpreted for us), ”we love you with all our hearts and have come down to wish you a good-by.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE GRAND CAnON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS
The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Canon, and the western slope between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.
Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of 2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but with pictographs resembling the ancient Phoenician signs from which our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed the canons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet high in the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge meteorite.
Of the Grand Canon little need be said here; not because there is nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole length of the Grand Canon--200 miles--and hundreds of the lesser canons that strike off sidewise from Grand Canon are still unexplored and unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in from San Diego, you are in a poor-man's paradise so far as a camp holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Canon and 100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National Forests are not the People's Playground of _all_ America; that they do not belong to the East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned in maintaining and protecting them?
You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to another--both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from $1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made, with the greatest ease in a day.
Don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big knock-you-down variety! To go from the s.p.a.cious glories of the boundless Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is like pa.s.sing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery, London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go looking for ”big” things you'll come away disappointed; but if like Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, ”the flower in the crannied wall” has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in the Painted Desert.
In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic, sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light, when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle.
Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the G.o.ds of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the gravel in this fas.h.i.+on. Then someone cries out, ”Why, look, that's a tree!” and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the rec.u.mbent trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and he declared without hesitation that many of these p.r.o.ne, pillared giants must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand.
The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are unknown. Only water--oceans and aeons of water--could have rolled and swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.
[Ill.u.s.tration: There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Canon in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and been disappointed]
But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands, caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks.
Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard, fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the petrified wood was exploited commercially and s.h.i.+pped away in carloads to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.
You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a p.r.o.ne giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130 feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an emperor's throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a child--picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into colored diamonds.
I said don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every single bit of rock is as.h.i.+ne with the colors of broken rainbows; or go there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of light--there is something the matter with you if you don't have a big thrill with a capital ”B.”
There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don't. All these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana, was one of the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert Potter of the Forestry Department, Was.h.i.+ngton, who rescued Sheriff Woods of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days.
Stevenson can tell that story as few men know it; and dozens of others he can tell of the old, wild, pioneer days when a man had to be all man and fearless to his trigger tips, or cash in, and cash in quick. At Holbrook you can get the story of the Show-Low Ranch and all the $50,000 worth of stock won in a cut of cards; or of how they hanged Stott and Scott and Wilson--mere boys, two of them in Tonto Basin, for horses which they didn't steal. All through this Painted Desert you are just on the other side of a veil from the Land of True Romance; but you'll not lift that veil, believe me, with a patronizing Eastern question. You'll find your way in, if you know how; and if you don't know how, no man can teach you. And at Adamana, don't forget to see the pictograph rocks.
Then you'll appreciate why the scientists wonder whether the antiquity of the Orient is old as the antiquity of our own America.
Flagstaff, frankly, does not live up to its own opportunities. It is the gateway to many Aztec ruins--much more easily accessible to the public than the Frijoles cave dwellings of New Mexico. Only nine miles out by easy trail are cliff dwellings in Walnut Canon. These differ from the Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken advantage of natural arches high in the face of unscalable precipices and have bricked up the faces of these with adobe. As far as I know, not so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attempted in excavation.
The debris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe brick in front is gradually crumbling and rolling down the precipice into Walnut Canon. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery and shard in the debris piles; and the day we went out, five minutes' scratching over of one cliff floor unearthed bits of wampum sh.e.l.l that from the perforations had evidently been used as a necklace. The Forestry Service has a man stationed here to guard the old ruins; but the Government might easily go a step further and give him authority to attempt some slight restoration. You drive across a cinder plain from Flagstaff and suddenly drop down to a footpath that takes you to the brink of circling gray stone canons many hundreds of feet deep. Along the top ledges of these amid such rocks as mountain sheep might frequent are the cliff houses--hundreds and hundreds of them, which no one has yet explored. At the bottom of the lonely, silent, dark canon was evidently once a stream; but no stream has flowed here in the memory of the white race; and the cliff houses give evidence of even greater age than the caves.
Only forty-seven miles south of Flagstaff are Montezuma's Castle and Well. Drivers can be hired in Flagstaff to take you out at from $4 to $6 a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle and the Well, where you can stay at very trifling cost, indeed.
It comes as a surprise to see here at Flagstaff, wedged between the Painted Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped peaks of the Francisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,000 feet high, an easy climb to the novice. Only twenty miles out at Oak Creek is one of the best trout brooks of the Southwest; and twenty-five miles out is a ranch house in a cool canon where health and holiday seekers can stay all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from East Verde that you go to the Natural Bridge. The central span of this bridge is 100 feet from the creek bottom, and the creek itself deposits lime so rapidly that if you drop a stone or a hat down, it at once encrusts and petrifies. Also at Flagstaff is the famous Lowell Observatory. In fact, if Flagstaff lived up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp outfitters on the spot, it could as easily have 10,000 tourists a month as it now has between 100 and 200.
When you reach the Grand Canon, you have come to the uttermost wonder of the Southwestern Wonder World. There is nothing else like it in America.
There is nothing else remotely resembling it in the known world; and no one has yet been heard of who has come to the Grand Canon and gone away disappointed. If the Grand Canon were in Egypt or the Alps, it is safe to wager it would be visited by every one of the 300,000 Americans who yearly throng Continental resorts. As it is, only 30,000 people a year visit it; and a large proportion of them are foreigners.
<script>