Milton Would Have Been Delighted

In the midst of the Rocky Mountain region is located a great mountain-encircled basin – the Uinta Basin. One of the first United States Army expeditions to enter and traverse the Basin—its route following approximately the course of the White River—saw the fantastic rock formations carved by the elements during ages long past. The visitors named the territory near the lower course of the stream "The Goblin City," a very appropriate name, although it describes only a part of the carved forms. We would call the grotesque carvings creations of fancy if they did not really exist in forms so tangible that they may be, and are, photographed.

Nature has endowed these rock structures with colorings so delicate, and yet so distinctive, that every nuance is represented. Black and white photography cannot reproduce this effect. There are many and varied architectural forms, accurately carved by the elements. I have always thought, in fact, that they should be studied, for from them could be garnered valuable and original suggestions for beauty, impressiveness and ornamentation in architecture. Other forms are fantastic forms although not, perhaps, always worthy of imitation, they appeal to our imagination.

Before he became blind, with what delight Milton would have wandered through these scenes! How the lonely and mentally isolated Dante would have revelled in this imagery in stone! Although some of the scenes appear to us to be the symbol of chaos, they are not chaotic. They were formed by the orderly forces that abide here and have been in the solid earth and have hovered in the desert air from the time of the "Ancient of Days." These same orderly forces are even now, in our day, continuing in their work of carving forms from the rocks. When one passes through these scenes it seems that over them breathes the atmosphere of the past. Is it that some of the scenes remind one of old and ruined cities? That the monuments suggest the dead, and that the carvings represent weathered forms chiselled by man in the days of ancient times?

However this may be, the ideas of a long past and the impression that the remains of the dead rest here is true. Here are found the remains of animals unknown in the flesh, animals that walk the earth no more. But that is another story. The old Uinta stage line winding southward from Vernal to Watson, Utah, passed through a weird waste of gray and red hills called "badlands." The old term, "washed lands," used by some of the early Western explorers, is a better name for such barren tracts. These lands, like many similarly eroded deposits, contain the bones of turtles and mammals that lived in the olden days. Due to the comparatively rapid "washing," or eroding, and the scarcity of soil arid vegetation, the bones are frequently exposed to view.

By: davidbunch

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