Ute Pass leads over into South Park, and before the days of railways it was greatly traveled by passengers and by freight wagons to Leadville and Fairplay. There is less transit there now, but in summer pleasure-parties constantly traverse the Pass, partly for its own sake and partly to enjoy a sight of Manitou Park on the opposite side, whence a magnificent array of the snowy interior ranges is to be seen, northward and westward, while Pike’s Peak presents itself to superior advantage from that point of view. In the park is a good little hotel and dairy, and a trout stream and pond where the Eastern brook-trout has been assiduously cultivated. In the fall Manitou Park is the resort of deer hunters and grouse shooters.
Then there is the already mentioned Garden of the Gods, hidden behind those garish walls of red and yellow sandstone, so stark and out of place in the soberly-toned landscape that they travesty nature, converting the whole picture into a theatrical scene, and a highly spectacular one at that. Passing behind these sensational walls, one is not surprised to find a sort of gigantic peep-show in pantomime. The solid rocks have gone masquerading in every sort of absurd costume and character. The colors of the make-up, too, are varied from black through all the browns and drabs to pure white, and then again through yellows and buffs and pinks up to staring red. Who can portray adequately these odd forms of chiseled stone? I have read a dozen descriptions, and so have you, no doubt. But one I have just seen, in a letter by a Boston lady, is so pertinent you should have the pleasure of reading it:
“The impression is of something mighty, unreal and supernatural. Of the gods surely—but the gods of the Norse Walhalla in some of their strange outbursts of wild rage or uncouth playfulness. The beauty-loving divinities of Greece and Rome could have nothing in common with such sublime awkwardness. Jove’s ambrosial curls must shake in another Olympia than this. Weird and grotesque, but solemn and awful at the same time, as if one stood on the confines of another world, and soon the veil would be rent which divided them. Words are worse than useless to attempt such a picture. Perhaps if one could live in the shadow of its savage grandeur for months until his soul were permeated, language would begin to find itself flowing in proper channels, but in the first stupor of astonishment one must only hold his breath. The Garden itself, the holy of holies, as most fancy, is not so overpowering to me as the vast outlying wildness.
“To pass in between massive portals of rock of brilliant terra-cotta red, and enter on a plain miles in extent, covered in all directions with magnificent isolated masses of the same striking color, each lifting itself against the wonderful blue of a Colorado sky with a sharpness of outline that would shame the fine cutting of an etching; to find the ground under your feet, over the whole immense surface, carpeted with the same rich tint, underlying arabesques of green and gray, where grass and mosses have crept; to come-upon masses of pale velvety gypsum, set now and again as if to make more effective by contrast the deep red which strikes the dominant chord of the picture; and always, as you look through or above, to catch the stormy billows of the giant mountain range tossed against the sky, with the regal snow-crowned massiveness of Pike’s Peak rising over all, is something, once seen, never to be forgotten. Strange, grotesque shapes, mammoth caricatures of animals, clamber, crouch, or spring from vantage points hundreds of feet in air. Here a battlemented wall is pierced by a round window; there a cluster of slender spires lift themselves; beyond, a leaning tower slants through the blue air, or a cube as large as a dwelling-house is balanced on a pivot-like point at the base, as if a child’s strength could upset it. Imagine all this scintillant with color, set under a dazzling sapphire dome, with the silver stems and delicate frondage of young cottonwoods in one space, or a strong young hemlock lifting green symmetrical arms from some high rocky cleft in another. This can be told, but the massiveness of sky-piled masonry, the almost infernal mixture of grandeur and grotesqueness, are beyond expression. After the first few moments of wild exclamation one sinks into an awed silence.”
The reader must see for himself these grotesque monuments, these relics of ruined strata, these sportive, wind-cut ghosts of the old regime here, these fanciful images of things seen and unseen, which stand thickly over hundreds of acres like the moldering ruins of some half-buried city of the desert, if he would fully understand.
Out of the many other sources of enjoyment near Manitou, the visitor will by no means neglect the Cave of the Winds. Though you may ride, if you wish, it is just a pleasant walk up Williams’ Cañon, one of the prettiest of the gorges that seam the rugged base of the great Peak. The walls are limestone, stained bright red and Indian yellow, lofty, vertical, and broken into a multitude of bastions, turrets, pinnacles and sweeping, hugely carved façades, whose rugged battlements tower hundreds of feet overhead against a sky of violet. At their bases these upright walls are so close together that much of the way there is not room for one carriage to pass another, and the track lies nearly always in the very bed of the sparkling brook. You seem always in a cul de sac among the zigzags of this irregular chasm, and sometimes the abundant foliage, rooted in the crevices above, meets in an arch across the brightly-painted but narrow space you are tortuously threading.
Half a mile up the cañon, at the end of the roadway, a trail goes by frequent turnings up the precipitous sides of the ravine to where a sheer cliff begins, about three hundred feet higher. Floundering up this steep and slippery goat-path, we arrived breathless at a stairway leading through an arch of native rock into a great chimney, opening out to the sunlight above, and found opposite us a niche which served as ante-room and entrance to the cave.
The history of this cave is entertaining, for it was the discovery, in June, 1880, of two boys of Colorado Springs, who were members of an “exploring society,” organized by the pastor of the Congregational Church there to provide the boys of his Sunday-school with some safe and healthful outlet for their adventurous spirits.
The cave, as we saw it, is a labyrinth of narrow passages, occasionally opening out into chambers of irregular size (and never with very high ceilings), into which protrude great ledges and points of rock from the stratified walls, still further limiting the space. These passages are often very narrow, and in many cases you must stoop in crowding through, or, if you insist upon going to the end, squirm along, Brahmin-like, on your stomach. The avenues and apartments are not all upon the same level, but run over and under each other, and constantly show slender fox holes branching off, which the guide tells you lead to some stygian retreat you have visited or are about to see. In remote portions of the cave there are very large rooms, like Alabaster Hall, some of which are encumbered with fallen masses and with pillars of drip stone.
The cave is not remarkable for large stalactites and stalagmites, but excels in its profusion of small ornaments, produced by the solution of the rock and its re-deposition in odd and pretty forms. From many of the ledges hang rows of small stalactites like icicles from wintry eaves, and often these have fine musical tones, so that by selecting a suitable number, varied in their pitch, simple tunes can easily and very melodiously be played by tapping. In some parts of the cave, the stalactites are soldered together into a ribbed mass, like a cascade falling over the ledges. Elsewhere the “ribbon” or “drapery” form of flattened stalactites recalls to you the Luray Caves, though here it is carried out on a smaller scale; while in this particular, as in many others, reminding one of the magnificent Virginia caverns only by small suggestions, in one respect this cave far surpasses in beauty its Eastern prototype. The floors of many rooms are laid, several inches deep, with incrustations of lime-work, which is embroidered in raised ridges of exquisite carving. Again, where water has been caught in depressions, these basins have been lined with a continuous, crowding plush of minute lime crystals,—like small tufted cushions of yellow and white moss. Such depressed patches occur frequently; moreover, the rapid evaporation of these pools, in confined spaces, has so surcharged the air with carbonated moisture, that particles of lime have been deposited on the walls of the pocket in a thousand dainty and delicate forms,—tiny stalactites and bunches of stone twigs,—until you fancy the most airy of milleporic corals transferred to these recesses. Here often the air seems foggy as your lamp-rays strike it, and the growing filigree-work gleams alabaster-white under the spray that is producing its weird and exquisite growth. In this form of minute and frost-like ornamentation, the cave excels anything I know of anywhere, and is strangely beautiful.