On the northeast of the San Francisco Plateau is the valley of the
Little Colorado, a tributary of the Colorado River. This river is formed
by streams that head chiefly on the San Francisco Plateau, but in part
on the Zuni Plateau. The Little Colorado is a marvelous river. In
seasons of great rains it is a broad but shallow torrent of mud; in
seasons of drought it dwindles and sometimes entirely disappears along
portions of its course. The upper tributaries usually run in beautiful
box canyons. Then the river flows through a low, desolate, bad-land
valley, and the river of mud is broad but shallow, except in seasons of
great floods. But fifty miles or more above the junction of this stream
with the Colorado River proper, it plunges into a canyon with limestone
walls, and steadily this canyon increases in depth, until at the mouth
of the stream it has walls more than 4,000 feet in height. The contrast
between this canyon portion and the upper valley portion is very great.
Above, the river ripples in a broad sheet of mud; below, it plunges with
violence over great cataracts and rapids. Above, the bad lands stretch
on either hand. This is the region of the Painted Desert, for the marls
and soft rocks of which the hills are composed are of many
colors--chocolate, red, vermilion, pink, buff, and gray; and the naked
hills are carved in fantastic forms. Passing to the region below,
suddenly the channel is narrowed and tumbles down into a deep, solemn
gorge with towering limestone cliffs.

All round the margin of the valley of the Little Colorado, on the side
next to the Zuni Plateau and on the side next to the San Francisco
Plateau, every creek and every brook runs in a beautiful canyon. Then
down in the valley there are stretches of desert covered with sage and
grease wood. Still farther down we come to the bad lands of the Painted
Desert; and scattered through the entire region low mesas or smaller
plateaus are everywhere found.