A picture they made showed their boats floated up
in this side canyon. Our stage was much lower than this. F.S.
Dellenbaugh, the author of "A Canyon Voyage," was a member of this
second expedition. This book had been our guide down to this point; we
could not have asked for a better one. Below here we had a general
idea of the nature of the river, and had a set of the government maps,
but we had neglected to provide ourselves with detailed information
such as this volume gave us.
Evening of the following day found us at Cataract Creek Canyon, but
with a stage of water in the river nearly fifty feet lower than that
which we had seen a few years before. The narrow entrance of this
great canyon gives no hint of what it is like a few miles above.
The Indian village is in the bottom of a 3000-foot canyon, half a mile
wide and three miles long, covered with fertile fields, peach and
apricot orchards. It even contained a few fig trees. Below the village
the canyon narrowed to a hundred yards, with a level bottom, covered
with a tangle of wild grape vines, cactus, and cottonwood trees. This
section contained the two largest falls, and came to an end about four
miles below the first fall. Then the canyon narrowed, deep and gloomy,
until there was little room for anything but the powerful, rapidly
descending stream. At the lower end it was often waist deep and
fifteen or twenty feet wide. It was no easy task to go through this
gorge.
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