Show BAD MONTANA mile on miles of rugged chasms fantastically carved it beema to me that no human belag can stand on that and view that marvelous labyrinth ot wild nature without belne thrilled by it instantly your thoughts fly to the grand canyon of the colorado as seen from point sublime only athla Is in miniature the fact that you stand on a sharp point from which the world drops steeply away on three sides Is not the thing that la so profoundly impressive it is the depth the breadth and the awful wilderness of the maze of bad lands int which you look before you and on either hand there stretch allea upon miles of ragged chasms divided and walled in by a thousand fantastic cliffs and buttresses and domes of naked hard pan that stubbornly defy the forces of erosion and refuse to crumble down in several places there are masses of earth architecture that remind one of the ruined castles on the rhine these bare walls are mostly of gray earth not rock and the carving of them has been most strangely done it Is only when you climb among them and touch them that the wonders of erosion are fully revealed the hard dry earth has most stubbornly resisted the disintegrating action of the water wind heat aad cold and there are hundreds of earth cliffs nearly as smooth and as perpendicular as the brick walls of harlem I 1 dislike to estimate the total drop of these bad lands from the plateau to the waters of snow creek but I 1 think it Is about feet after the first moments of spellbound wonder and amaze you begin to pick out the geography of what lies before you you see that the axis of all this wild waste of carved and furrowed earth Is the level and very narrow valley of snow creek which comes down from the west you can easily trace its course eastward to the point where it bends abruptly northward and runs into the missouri parallel with the last eight miles of hell creek in tho creek bottom there is a sinuous string of cottonwood trees ashens aspens and willow brush scribner |