. The continent we live on. Physical geography; Natural history. This province displays a great nitmher of the major vegetational hells and zones to he encountered on this continent because at least half of it stands on the true deserts, whereas some of its peaks are high enough to support year-round icefields. It is also unique in that rock strata representing alt known geological ages from the Pre-Cambrian of 750 million years ago to the present are somewhere to be seen on its surface. It is a large, isolated, and well-defined province, being some seven hundred miles from north to south and
. The continent we live on. Physical geography; Natural history. This province displays a great nitmher of the major vegetational hells and zones to he encountered on this continent because at least half of it stands on the true deserts, whereas some of its peaks are high enough to support year-round icefields. It is also unique in that rock strata representing alt known geological ages from the Pre-Cambrian of 750 million years ago to the present are somewhere to be seen on its surface. It is a large, isolated, and well-defined province, being some seven hundred miles from north to south and six hundred miles at its widest. Mount Elbert at the apex of the Colorado area is over feet high. That part of it which is not in the desert is wholly contained within the North Scrub Belt, and this produces some weird effects. Although either wholly mountainous or high plateau, it is edged by pockets of lowlands, it contains one great (the Wyoming) and sundry smaller basins, and its whole center is composed of a sort of fern-frond-shaped gutter drained by a single river system—the Colorado. It is formed of five great subprovinces. including three mountainous ones which may be called the Colorado, the Utah, and the Arizona blocks, and two major basins—the Wyoming and the Colorado "Plateau" or better, Platea. The three mountain blocks form a complete ring around the latter, with narrow connecting causeways in the north, west, and east. Oddly, the main river cuts right through the northern of these, but. instead of doing the same through the western on its way out of the platea, it has cut the mighty Grand Canyon through almost the widest and highest stretch of the adjoining mountains and left to one side a natural ouliel dammed by only a narrow neck of highlands. Its boundaries are almost everywhere as precise as scacoasts On the east is the edge of the Great Prairie plateau, from which the mountains rise as from an ocean. (Incidentally, the Continental Divi
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