River Notes by Wade Davis

Author:Wade Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

We have cut through the sandstones and limestones met in the upper part of the canyon, and through one great bed of marble a thousand feet in thickness. As this great bed forms a distinctive feature of the canyon, we call it Marble Canyon.

—John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, 1987

As the rain increased, I heard some rocks tumbling down behind us, and, looking up, I saw one of the grandest and most exciting scenes of the crumbling and falling of what we so falsely call the everlasting hills. As the water began to pour over from the plateau above, it seemed as if the whole upper edge of the Canyon had begun to move. Little streams, rapidly growing into torrents, came over the hard upper stratum from every crevice and fell on the softer slopes below. . . . As the larger blocks of rock plunged ahead of the streams, they crashed against other blocks, lodged on the slopes, and, bursting with an explosion like dynamite, broke into pieces, while the fragments flew into the air in every direction, hundreds of feet above our heads, and as the whole conglomerate mass of water, mud and flying rocks came down the slopes nearer to where we were, it looked as if nothing could prevent us from being buried in an avalanche of rock and mud.

—Robert Brewster Stanton, Down the Colorado, 1920

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