This wonderful highland is a malpais or
lava formation and densely covered with a forest of stately pines and
mountain juniper. Strange to say, vegetation thrives incredibly in
the rocky lava; a knee-high growth of the most nutritious grama
grasses, indigent to this region, rippled in the breeze like waves of
a golden sea and we saw numerous signs of deer, antelope, and turkey.
Our road, a mere trail, wound over this plateau, which was a
veritable impenetrable jungle in places, a part of the great Coconino
forest. Think and wonder! An unbroken forest of ten thousand square
miles, it is said to be the most extensive woodland on the face of
the globe. This trail was the worst road to travel I have seen or
expect ever to pass over. The wagons moved as ships tossed on a
stormy sea, chuck! chuck! from boulder to boulder, without
intermittence. We found delicious spring water about noon and passed
a most remarkable place later in the day. This must have been the pit
of a volcano. A few steps aside from the road you might lean over the
precipice and look straight down into a great, round crater, so deep
that it made a person dizzy. At the bottom there was a ranch house, a
small lake and a cultivated field, the whole being apparently ten
acres in area.
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