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I9 THE CITY of Grand Junction, Colorado, sprawled out on the Mancos shale. The Mancos here, Brown said, was the equivalent ofthe Cody in the Baxter Basin. The grey soil ofthe surrounding countryside was soft clay, bed of an ancient ocean that lay here before the Rocky Mountains were born. We arrived late in the day and left in the early morning for Cedaredge. A gravel road led east. High mesas. Towering walls with a familiar look; the sandstones and coal-bearing measures of the Mesaverde. The eroding Mancos rose to meet them like rough waves beating against cliffs. All blue with the haze of distance. At the village of Cedaredge we learned the States Coal Mine lay a mile or so to the north, at the foot of Grand Mesa. Our road climbed the last of the rising Mancos to enter a little valley, glaring green with alfalfa fields, soft green with rows of aspen along the fences. It passed under a cliff of brownish-yellow sandstone seventy-five to a hundred feet high. Brown studied it intently from his side of the Buick. "That's the Rollins Sandstone," he told me, "Probably the equivalent of the Ericson in Rock Springs. About the Golden Wall ... " A tall coal tipple interrupted the correlation. Tipple and buildings were weather-beaten, the tired grey of old barns, contrasting with the bright gleam of freshly mined coal in a chute beside the tipple track. A lazy curl of blue smoke, acrid smoke, rose from a nearby burning slag pile. The road passed between a small bunkhouse and an office building, terminating in a turn-around under the chute. We parked the Buick beside the bunkhouse and inquired about Mr. States from a man standing in the boiler room door. "He'll be down from his house right away," he told us. "He seen you coming." 103 The man who hurried down the path past the tipple was perhaps sixty-five, short ofstature, mild of manner and speech. He had been expecting Brown and was delighted to see us. He began telling us at once about the tracks in his mine; their discovery had been an exciting event in his life. He led us into the office nearby, picked out a carbide light, and began tinkering with its mechanism. "I know you'll want to go underground for a good look right away, " he said. We slipped on old coats, and I lighted up a gasoline lantern we had brought from Rock Springs. We followed States up a little narrow-gauge railway leading to the mine entrance, then single-file into a timbered tunnel, where a cool breeze with a coal smell fanned us. "We're really headed for another mine, the States-Hall," States told us. "It connects with this one. Easier to walk through than to drive around. The tracks are over there. " At first, coming out of the bright day, our yellow lights seemed feeble indeed, but as we got deeper in the dark and our eyes became accustomed , our lights seemed to brighten greatly and to strike bright gleams from the black coal walls. We were beyond timbers now. The overhead was a smooth sandstone, medium fine-grained, a stone page in the Mesaverde sea-world where sunlight hadn't shone for eighty million years. The coal seam was eight feet thick. We were constantly passing , or entering, tunnels along the way. States led us right, left, right, right, left, unhesitatingly. Here and there along the way, miners worked busily. We passed the last of the working miners and came into broad and tremendously high rooms. "The coal seam is fourteen feet here," States told us. "Solid. In some places it is cut by a sandstone stringer, but here ... " I computed in my head a little. A swamp a Ont'" of the dinosaur tracks in the roof of the StHes Mine. Photo by Bird. hundred feet thick with dead plant material had lain here ages to form this great bed of coal. Our own little noises heightened the oppressive vastness of the silence. "We haven't taken coal from here in years," States told us. "The workings over there on our right are abandoned." We were going downgrade steadily and noticed a growing trickle of water in a gutter along the edge. A compressed air water pump chugged along at its job. At the end of several hundred feet of straight passage we came out into an enormous room with...

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