14 Wonderland

“Alice in Wonderland” is a fairy-tale, but there is a real Wonderland out in the West. One of the wonders is a river. It is called the Colorado River, but it is not in the State of Colorado. It is in Arizona.

The river runs deep down in the bottom of the deepest ditch in the World, a ditch a mile deep in places. This ditch is called by the Spaniards a Canyon. You can stand on the edge of the Colorado Canyon and look almost a mile down to what seems a slender little thread of water—the Colorado River—running at the bottom, and yet this little stream has cut this ditch in which it runs—worn it down—all by itself. Here we can see, better than any place i.t.w.W., what the World looks like on the inside if we could dig down into it a mile deep, for here a little river has dug down a mile deep for us. I asked my guide how far it was across to the other side of the Canyon.

You can look almost a mile down

“Oh,” he replied, “about ten or twelve shouts.” That was a new distance to me, for I didn't even know how far one shout was. My arithmetic says twelve inches make a foot and three feet make a yard, but does not say how many feet make a “shout.” You can look across to the other side of the Canyon and see the opposite wall almost a mile high—not a plain, blank wall like the wall of a building, but more like the walls of heaven—layers of rock, pile upon pile, colored yellow, red, green, orange, purple, mixed with sunshine and shadow. All of this rock was once under the sea, for it is limestone and sandstone. Each layer has been dyed a different color by minerals like iron and copper; if there was iron in the water, it turned the rock the color of iron rust—red; if copper, it turned the rock green.

I once bought a souvenir pencil. In its end was a pinhole, and when you squinted into the hole with one eye, there you saw in all its vastness the Colorado Canyon. It seemed impossible, and yet there it was, stretching off in the distance, mile upon mile, in a picture the size of a pin head!

Some of the branches of the Colorado run in smaller canyons, and high up on the walls of these canyons are houses built in caves in the rock. Once upon a time, long, long ago, people whom we call “cliff-dwellers” built these homes there to be safe from their enemies.

A giant hop and skip north from the Grand Canyon would bring one to the State of Utah, where there is a great lake, but this Great Lake is different from the five “Great Lakes.” The water in the five Great Lakes is fresh, the water in this great lake is salt, so it is called Great Salt Lake, though it is really a little ocean. As in the case of the ocean, rivers run into the Great Salt Lake, but no rivers run out of it.

What makes it salt ?

The same thing that makes the ocean salt.

cliff dwellings

What makes the ocean salt?

The ground through which rivers flow is salt. If you ever tasted the ground, you would know it, but, of course, I don't suppose you ever have, unless you have fallen and gotten some in your mouth or on your lips. Rivers, as they flow along, wash some of this salt out of the ground, carry it along, and dump it into the ocean. They carry so little salt at a time you would never know by tasting the river water that it was salt at all, but the rivers pour in this ever so little bit of salt all the time, all the time, and so the salt gradually does collect in the ocean and in Great Salt Lake, for there is no way for the salt to go out once it's in the ocean or the lake. The water gets out of the lake as it does out of the ocean—by rising into the air as vapor—evaporating, we call it—but the salt doesn't evaporate, it can't rise into the air, and so it has no way of getting out.

The Great Salt Lake is getting saltier and saltier all the time. It is already much saltier than the ocean. Salt water holds up a person or anything in it much better than fresh water, and the saltier the water the more it holds the person up. So in Great Salt Lake you couldn't drown whether you knew how to swim or not. You can stand in the water or sit in the water or lie down on the water as you would on a sofa.You can read the paper or eat your luncheon while sitting in the water, but you have to be very careful not to get any of the water in your eyes or in any small cut you may have on your hands or body, for the salt water is so strong it smarts. Some day the ocean will be as salty as Great Salt Lake, for the ocean too is slowly, very slowly, getting saltier and saltier all the time. Then, even if there were a shipwreck, people would not drown—they would bob about in the sea like corks.

Still farther north, a hop, skip, and a jump from the Colorado Canyon, in the corner of the State of Wyoming, is a place that looks on the map like a little State within the State. It is called Yellowstone Park. There are so many wonderful things in this part of the State—freaks, funny things, and lovely things—that the United States thought people would like to see them, so they made a Park of this corner of the State, with good roads and hotels, for people who wish to see the sights. No hunting is allowed, so wild animals and birds can live and raise families without fear of being killed. There are bears in Yellowstone Park, but as they are not allowed to be hunted or shot, they become very tame and people can even go close enough to photograph them.

The World in that part of the country has not yet cooled off altogether, and it is still very hot not far down under the ground. If a person asked me to have a glass of spring water, I should expect a nice cool drink; but if the spring were in Yellowstone Park the water would probably scald my throat, for there are hundreds of springs in Yellowstone Park heated so hot by underground fires that they boil up and over like a pot on the fire.

There is a big lake in Yellowstone Park called Yellowstone Lake. You can stand on its edge and catch a fish in the lake and, without taking the fish off the hook, drop it into one of the hot springs near shore and cook it. In other places the water is blown up by the steam underneath into fountains. These fountains are called “geysers,” and some are quite big and some are quite beautiful. One called “Old Faithful” spouts regularly about once every hour, throwing a beautiful stream of water straight up into the air like a gigantic fire-hose. It does this so faithfully that it seems almost as if a person turned the water on and off, but it has been spouting this way ever since it has been known—never missing an hour, night or day, never forgetting, never running down, more faithful than any human being would or could be.