(hand tinted)
Now we have ascended the west rim trail and are looking down into the magnificent Zion Canyon. Directly in the southwest, dominating every other eminence, towers the Great White Throne. At our left is Angels Landing, its northeastern face a sheer precipice of pink and red, slightly convex. A ridge of red sandstone connects it with a castellated pile called the Organ. At the foot of the wall directly opposite us runs the automobile highway to the Temple of Sinawava.
Observe how the Mukuntuweap River comes straight from the north, is deflected eastward by Angels Landing and its abutments and winds around the Organ, past the foot of the Great White Throne. The rocks of the Angels Landing formation are evidently of more resistant texture for the full force of the powerful predecessor of the Mukuntuweap River swept against them only to be checked and turned; and yet the stream has eroded away a great mass of rock that once filled the gap through which we now see the base of the Great White Throne.
Upon the Great White Throne and the eastern wall of the canyon behind it, the upper half of the visible rock is white. Our vantage point, lofty as it is, is just at the top of the Vermilion Cliff formation. We are in fact upon a wide shelf, somewhat less than half way to the West Rim. Behind us and some distance back from the edge over which we are gazing rises an immense white wall recessed into deep amphitheaters and thrusting out fantastic bell-shaped buttes and gables of ghostly tints, the bare sandstone all patterned with intricate cross-bedding. Lesser canyons, deep and narrow, cut hither and thither into the white wall which bears upon its flat summit a dense forest of tall pines.
