ODDITIES
Engineers "lifted the face" of a rock cliff in Zion
National Park, Utah, and then tunneled a mile-long highway through the
cliff, when there seemed no practicable way of getting around the canyon
wall. There are turnouts in the tunnel from where views of the canyon
can be had through six windows. The cliff is so steep that the windows
first had to be drilled, and the tunnel then completed between these
points.
There are sixty-five named mountains in Rocky
Mountain National Park, Colorado, that reach altitudes above 10,000
feet; twenty-seven of them are between 12,000 and 13,000 feet high.
Long's Peak, the highest, reaches 14,255 feet. Summer visitors who live
at the base of these great mountains are 8,000 feet, or more than a mile
and a half, above sea level.
The Grand Canyon, a mile deep, is the world's
greatest example of erosion. The surface around the rim is rising,
perhaps a few inches a century, and the down cutting of the canyon by
the Colorado River is just about keeping pace with the elevation. The
canyon is probably getting deeper, but the level of the river bed is not
becoming lower. Some believe that the river was never any higher than it
is today.
Relics of an aboriginal people who vanished long
before the coming of Columbus, make Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado,
e veritable land of magic. Cliff dwellings, some in cave locations
occupied centuries earlier by the Basket Makers, first agricultural
Indians of the Southwest, are the major attraction. The earliest of the
cliff-dweller homes dates back nearly 900 years, to 1066 A. D.
One of the first plants operated for the smelting of
gold and silver in what is now part of the United States, is believed to
have been located in the Tumacacori National Monument, 18 miles north of
the Mexican border, and 50 miles south of Tucson, Arizona. Tumacacori
Mission was founded in about 1700. The date of the smelter's operation
is not known. The remains of the plant are in the mission grounds.
National Park Service Areas in Region III.
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