a story of beauty and grandeur that I hear yet-and shall hear.

The Cañon of Lodore is twenty and threequarter miles in length. It starts abruptly at what we have called the Gate of Lodore, with walls nearly two thousand feet high, and they are never lower than this until we reach Alcove Brook, about three miles above the foot. They are very irregular, standing in vertical or overhanging cliffs in places, terraced in others, or receding in steep slopes, and are broken by many side gulches and cañons. The highest point on the wall is at Dunn's Cliff, near Triplet Falls, where the rocks reach an altitude of 2,700 feet, but the peaks a little way back rise nearly a thousand feet higher. Yellow pines, nut pines, firs, and cedars stand in extensive forests on the Uinta Mountains, and, clinging to the rocks and growing in the crevices, come down the walls to the water's edge from Flaming Gorge to Echo

Park. The red sandstones are lichened over; delicate mosses grow in the moist places, and ferns festoon the walls.

CHAPTER V

FROM ECHO PARK TO THE MOUTH OF THE

T

UINTA RIVER

HE Yampa enters the Green from the east. At a point opposite its mouth, the Green runs to the south, at the foot of a rock, about seven hundred feet high and a mile long, and then turns sharply around it to the right, and runs back in a northerly course, parallel to its former direction, for nearly another mile, thus having the opposite sides of a long, narrow rock for its bank. The tongue of rock so formed is a peninsular precipice, with a mural escarpment along its whole course on the east, but broken down at places on the west.

On the east side of the river, opposite the rock, and below the Yampa, there is a little

park, just large enough for a farm, already fenced with high walls of gray homogeneous standstone. There are three river entrances to this park: one down the Yampa; one below, by coming up the Green; and another down the Green. There is also a land entrance down a lateral cañon. Elsewhere the park is inaccessible. Through this land-entrance by the side cañon there is a trail made by Indian hunters, who come down here in certain seasons to kill mountain sheep.

Great hollow domes are seen in the eastern side of the rock, against which the Green sweeps; willows border the river; clumps of box-elder are seen; and a few cottonwoods stand at the lower end. Standing opposite the rock, our words are repeated with startling clearness, but in a soft, mellow tone, that transforms them into magical music. Scarcely can you believe it is the echo of your own voice. In some places two or three echoes come back; in other places they repeat themselves, passing back and forth

across the river between this rock and the eastern wall.

To hear these repeated echoes well you must shout. Some of the party aver that ten or twelve repetitions can be heard. To me, they seem to rapidly diminish and merge by multiplicity, like telegraph poles on an outstretched plain. I have observed the same phenomenon once before in the cliffs near Long's Peak, and am pleased to meet with it again.

During the afternoon, Bradley and I climb some cliffs to the north. Mountain sheep are seen above us, and they stand out on the rocks, and eye us intently, not seeming to move. Their color is much like that of the gray sandstone beneath them, and, immovable as they are, they appear like carved forms. Now a fine ram beats the rock with his front foot, and, wheeling around, they all bound away together, leaping over rocks and chasms, and climbing walls where no man can follow, and this with an ease and gracefulness most wonder