"Around the Circle": One Thousand Miles Through the Rocky Mountains

by Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company

ROYAL GORGE.

THE ROYAL GORGE.

The crowning wonder of this wonderful Denver & Rio Grande Railroad is the Royal Gorge. Situated between Cañon City and Salida, it is easy of access either from Denver or Pueblo. After the entrance to the cañon has been made, surprise and almost terror comes. The train rolls round a long curve close under a wall of black and banded granite, beside which the ponderous locomotive shrinks to a mere dot, as if swinging on some pivot in the heart of the mountain, or captured by a centripetal force that would never resign its grasp. Almost a whole circle is accomplished, and the grand amphitheatrical sweep of the wall shows no break in its zenith-cutting facade. Will the journey end here? Is it a mistake that this crevice goes through the range? Does not all this mad water gush from some powerful spring, or boil out of a subterranean channel impenetrable to us? No, it opens. Resisting centripetal, centrifugal force claims the train, and it breaks away at a tangent past the edge or around the corner of the great black wall which compelled its detour and that of the river before it. Now what glories of rock piling confront the wide-distended eye! How those sharp-edged cliffs, standing with upright heads that play a handball with the clouds, alternate with one another, so that first the right, then the left, then the right one beyond strike our view, each one half obscured by its fellow in front, each showing itself level browed with its comrades as we come even with it, each a score of hundreds of dizzy feet in height, rising perpendicularly from the water and the track, splintered atop into airy pinnacles, braced behind against the almost continental mass through which the chasm has been cleft. This is the Royal Gorge.

The following is a description of the points of interest in the exact order on the Trip Around the Circle, starting from Denver:

Castle Rock.—32 miles from Denver, east side of track. A bold and remarkable promontory rising from the plain.

Casa Blanca.—50 miles from Denver, between Greenland station and Palmer Lake, west side of track. An enormous white rock, 1,000 feet long and 200 feet high, presenting the appearance of a castle.

Palmer Lake.—52 miles from Denver. A beautiful sheet of water on the exact summit of the Divide, altitude 7,238 feet.

PIKE'S PEAK FROM THE GARDEN OF THE GODS.

Glen Park.—Half mile south of Palmer Lake, west side of track. Colorado's Chautauqua.