Our Travel Continues

The next item on our California sightseeing tours was Yosemite Valley. There are main sights: the three highest waterfalls in North America, and a huge rock El Capitan from pure granite. This valley in California is improved. Those travelers, who come here by car, usually leave them in the parking at the information center, later moving on the bus. First, we decided to see the waterfalls of the valley. The path surrounded on all sides by pine trees and young redwoods, led to these sights. We stood on the left side of the path and saw both of the waterfalls. Yosemite Valley in California is a unique natural formations, it is punched in the granite rocks glacier. It resembles a flat triangle, surrounded by walls of the canyon. The village of "Yosemite" is the most well-organized part of the park, where is the information center. There is a museum nearby dedicated to the history of the park. We visited the museum and get great pleasure from it! Then we went to Mirror Lake. The road to the lake was surrounded by numerous trees and pines. Walk was very pleasant and easy: the snow crunched under our feet, bright sun made the trip just amazing. Yosemite Valley in California seemed us a tale in our travel!

But I must tell about the U.S. National Park Grand Canyon, which became one of the most important parts of our travel and we visited with equal gusto. It covers an area of about 5 thousand square km. The park was founded in 1908 to protect a unique natural formation - the gorge of the Colorado River, which is in the middle of its course. The length of this huge, great Canyon on Earth is about 350 km and its depth is a thousand and nine hundred meters. The width of the canyon ranges from six to twenty miles. This sight was formed over about 10 million years: the plain, which was flow Colorado, heaving under the influence of ground forces. The water flow was gradually cut into the plateau, washing out fairly soft rock canyon - limestone, sandstone and shale. The most ancient rocks - granites, whose destruction is much slower, are currently bottom of the gorge. Red-brown waters of Colorado run with speed of 20 km per hour (the name of the river is Spanish and means "red"), rolling along the bottom of the huge boulders and pebbles, and carrying with them so much sand and clay, that the river becomes completely opaque. Colorado takes to the sea about half a million tons of rock during the day. Stones and sand carried by the river increase the destructive effect produced by Colorado, and even the strongest granite of canyon is cleaned with this "sandpaper" annually for a quarter of a millimeter.