All of these mountains, though extremely rugged, precipitous, and adorned with spurs and protruding shoulders of naked rock, yet slope backward somewhat, and through one of these depressions passes a most remarkable and picturesque wagon road to Silverton, constructed at immense cost and displaying wonderful engineering skill. But at the lower side of the little basin, where the path of the river is beset with close cañon-walls, the cliffs rise vertical from the level of the village, and bear their forest-growth many hundreds of feet above. These mighty walls, two thousand feet high in some places, are of metamorphic rock, and their even stratification simulates courses of well-ordered masonry. Stained by iron and probably also by manganese, they are a deep red-maroon; this color does not lie uniformly, however, but is stronger in some layers than in others, so that the whole face of the cliff is banded horizontally in pale rust color, or dull crimson, or deep and opaque maroon. The western cliff is bare, but on the more frequent ledges of the eastern wall scattered spruces grow, and add to its attractiveness. Yet, as though Nature meant to teach that a bit of motion,—a suggestion of glee was needed to relieve the sombreness of utter immobility and grandeur however shapely, she has led to the sunlight by a crevice in the upper part of the eastern wall that we cannot see, a brisk torrent draining the snowfields of some distant plateau. This little stream, thus beguiled by the fair channel that led it through the spruce woods above, has no time to think of its fate, but is flung out over the sheer precipice eighty feet into the valley below. We see the white ghost of its descending, and always to our ears is murmured the voice of the Naiads who are taking the breathless plunge. Yet by what means the stream reaches that point from above, cannot be seen, and the picture is that of a strong jet of water bursting from an orifice through the crimson wall and falling into rainbow-arched mist and a tangle of grateful foliage, that hides its further flowing.
As Mr. Weston well says, and as I have insisted in my chapters upon the southern side of the San Juan range, the indescribable charm of this scenery is due not so much to its gigantic proportions, its grotesque and massively-grand outlines, or its variety of composition, as to the contrasts of color and condition. “Even now (May) while I write,” he says, “it is warm and summery in town, the side hills are covered with flowers and the whistle of the humming bird’s wing is heard in the air; yet I can look up at White House peak and see the snow banners blowing from its summit, as in the coldest day in winter. In the autumn, more especially, are the contrasts of color seen, and the landscape, as it then appears, if painted on canvas, would, I believe, be laughed at, if shown in Europe or the Eastern States, as an impossibility. I have climbed the heights above Ouray, and looked down on it, when the atmosphere of the valley seemed of a hazy blue, the sloping sides of the surrounding mountains being clothed with the golden yellow and the red brown of the quaking aspen and the dwarf oak, the varied greens of the spruce, balsam, cedar and yellow pine, and above that the brown gray of the trachyte peaks, their snow-capped summits forming a charming contrast against the lovely violet blue of the evening sky.”
This valley alone, with its everchanging panorama of summer and winter, of verdurous spring and the noise of gushing waters, of flaming autumn and the drapery of haze etherializing the world, presenting under always novel aspect the forms and colors so lavishly displayed—this nook alone would satisfy a generation of artists. But the enchantment of the half hidden gorges, the allurement of the beckoning peaks urge us to explore beauties beyond.
I cannot redescribe the way in which these bristling peaks of purple and green trachyte cut the tremulous sky, nor try to make you understand anew the abysses that sink narrowly between the closely crowded mountains. If the reader will kindly turn back to where I have endeavored to convey to him some idea of the Alps that lie about Baker’s park and at the head of the Rio Dolores and the Rio de La Plata, he will learn what I might repeat of scenes this side of the divide; for some of those former peaks can be seen from here, and this, too, equally with the southern slope, “is Silver San Juan.”
The ride across the hills towards Red mountain was something to be remembered. The great walls of maroon rock and the precipices that rose in terraced grandeur upon their shoulders, coming into view one by one as we ascended from the basin to the foothills, were all wet with the night dews, and gleamed like mirrors under the morning sun. The foothills themselves were rugged jumbles of rocks heaped about the base of the mountains, and full of deep crevices where the streams coursed far out of sight and hearing. They were covered with a mingled growth of spruces, cedars, small oaks and several other shrubby trees. There were open spaces where a dense chapparal or heather of small thorny bushes of various kinds hid the ground; and other slopes where tall grass and innumerable flowers formed favorite pastures for sedate groups of donkeys. Passing the dizzy brink of the chasm into which Bear creek makes its awful leap, snatching a beauty beyond portrayal from the very jaws of terror, we enter a rank forest of aspens and spruces. One might fire a pistol-ball across to the side of Mt. Hayden, which rises an almost sheer wall of indigo-gray from a gulf between us and it, whose creviced-bottom is out of sight below. Deep and varied shadows lie in the little ravines that seam its almost vertical slopes, and streaks of dusty snow lurk in the higher crannies feeding trickling cascades of sunbright water that drop like tears into the unfathomed cañon.
GRAND CAÑON OF THE COLORADO.
Through the trees southward, to the right of the triangular peak of Engineer mountain, and the great barrier of Abrams, we could now catch a glimpse of a rounded summit as gaudy as the hat of a cardinal. This was the Red mountain, of which so much has been heard. The road there follows the course of Red Mountain creek from its mouth for two miles through dense pine timber. At this point, four miles from Ouray, and two thousand feet higher, it enters a flat valley or park two miles long, which is covered with willows and with prairies of long grass that every autumn is mowed for hay. This park contains many ponds and miry places, and is said to be underlaid everywhere with bog iron-ore. On either side of the park is a high range of mountains and trachyte peaks, that on the west being the divide between the Red Mountain district and Imogene basin in the Sneffels district, and that on the east being the divide between the Red Mountain district and the Uncompahgre district and Poughkeepsie gulch. At the upper end of the park commences the chain of scarlet peaks, from twelve to thirteen thousand feet in altitude, which are regarded as the volcanic center toward which all the lodes of the surrounding region seem to converge.