Colorado Outings

BY JAMES STEELE.
ISSUED BY THE PASSENGER DEPARTMENT BURLINGTON ROUTE, CHICAGO.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY THE CHICAGO, BURLINGTON & QUINCY RAILROAD COMPANY.
A Colorado Mountain View—The Mount of the Holy Cross, as seen from near Leadville.
Colorado—for thirty years no geographical name has been oftener written in connection with the phrases that express height, vastness, space, clearness and a colossal beauty that never wearies or changes or grows old. Hundreds of books, millions of words, have described its scenes. Many thousands have visited it. Endowed with a beauty of fascinating awfulness, and with still another beauty that underlies the magnitude and sits serene amid the grandeur, the inadequate, word-trammeled idea of it has found endless expression, and yet the scenes of Colorado have never been described. Whoever has visited her ever after turns aside from words; whoever has not, can obtain from them but a faint conception of that which in truth can be imagined only in actual presence—and hardly even then.
Yet it seems necessary that maps should be drawn, and details written out, and the camera be called upon to reproduce the stupendous microscopic detail, and that magnificence should find a biographer and be put into figures that in the presence of the reality are almost meaningless. For it is a work-a-day world. The questions of time, distance, convenience, cost, possibility, cannot be barred from their foreordained connection in the human mind with even the magnificence that was builded by the æons; the beauty whose mother was cosmos.
Imagine, to begin with, the extent of this piece of scenery. Colorado contains 104,500 square miles—66,880,000 acres. Of this vast area—as big as all New England with Illinois added—two-thirds is mountains. Not such as claim that name in Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia and the Carolinas, but Titanic. The height of the average Alleghanies and of the Blue Ridge is perhaps 2,500 feet. The famed peaks of the chain may rise sometimes to 5,000 feet. Katahdin is 5,385 feet high, and there are others 3,400, 2,800, etc. The thirteen peaks of Mount Desert Island and vicinity are from 1,000 to 2,800 feet high. Mount Agamenticus is a hill that claims 670 feet. Kearsarge, historic name, has only 3,250 feet. The Peaks of Otter, in Virginia, climb to 4,200 feet.