Box Canyon, Colorado
- Categories
- Special Collections > Keystone Slides
- Type
- tiff scanned file from original glass slide
- Description
- This view was taken within the city limits of Ouray, 400 miles southwest of Denver. The city itself is a great mining center, and a summer resort. You can understand why it should be so by looking at the scene. The city has an altitude of 7,700 feet, and above it tower mountains from 3,000 to 7,000 feet. One of its chief points of interest is here shown. Box Canyon (kn´ yn) get its name from its likeness to a box. It would be a very rough, irregular box, indeed; but after all, the walls are almost straight up and down. Formerly a river flowed on the surface where the canyon is now. This stream began cutting its bed through the layers of stone. Year after year it carved a trench downward through the solid rock. But the rock here does not lie in even layers, so that parts of them have broken off irregularly. This causes great gaps throughout the course of the gulch. From ledge to ledge bridges have been built and ladders have been laid to different levels. Here tourists like to stroll, especially in the heat of a summer's day. A canyon is a valley with steep sides. The word is Spanish, and means a tube or a cannon. Canyons develop fastest on great heights where the climate is fairly dry and where the rock lies horizontally. The height gives the streams a swift flow. Hence the cutting into the rock goes on more rapidly than if the streams move slowly. The dry climate prevents the washing in of the sides of the stream by rainfall. Most of the mountain streams in Colorado are fed by melting snow. The water flows swiftly, staying in one channel year after year so that a gulch into the solid rock is cut after a time. What is a canyon? Where is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado? Explain how a canyon is formed. Keystone ID: 8008 Note: All titles, descriptions, and location coordinates are from the original Keystone Slide documentation as supplied by the Keystone View Company. No text has been edited or changed.
- Rights
- Copyright by the Keystone View Company. The original slides are housed in McConnell Library's Special Collections.
