VETA PASS.
Now, from within and far surmounting those portals, we stand gazing abroad, as in olden days they looked out of some castle tower through and beyond the great fortress arch. The typically mountain-like mass of Veta, satisfying all our ideals of how that style of elevation should look which does not abound in rugged cliff and sky-piercing pinnacles, but is smoothly and roundly huge, cuts off all northward outlook. Southward the crowded foothills of the divide between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas hide from view the central points in which they culminate,—even lofty Trinchera, whose sharp summit was so plain a landmark at the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo yesterday. Beyond these swelling domes and gables, and ridges of green and gray, were lifted the noble pyramids of the Spanish Peaks, their angles well defined in varying tints of purplish blue, and their grand old heads sustained in generous rivalry. (Illustration.) Behind us was only a piney slope, close at hand: but ahead—the world! I think no one has ever said enough of the beauty of this picture in Veta Pass. From the precipitous, wooded mountain-side where you stand, the eye follows the little creek as it glides with less and less disquietude down through the protruding bases of the diminishing foothills, into the slowly broadening valley where the willows are more dense, and the heather and small bushes have taken on brilliant colors to vie with the splendor of aspen-patches higher up; on to the hay-meadows fenced with the many-elbowed and scraggy faggots of red cedar; on past the little park where the low brown adobe houses of the Mexican rancheros look like mere pieces of flat rock fallen from the mountains; on into the midst of minute cornfields; on out, beyond the surf-like ridges breaking against the base of the range, to the blue and boundless sea of the plains.
The western side of the Pass is a tortuous descent through continuous woods and lessening hills, until you emerge upon a plain where the ragged heights of the Saguache Mountains fill the northern horizon; and as you turn southward the glorious serrated summits of the Sangre de Cristo range come into view behind and beside you, on the east. This plain is the San Luis Park, the largest of those four great interior plateaus—North Park, Middle Park, South Park and San Luis—which lie between the “Front” and the “Main” ranges of the Rockies.
It has been truly said of the Rocky Mountains that the word “range” does not express it at all. “It is a whole country, populous with mountains. It is as if an ocean of molten granite had been caught by instant petrifaction when its billows were rolling heaven-high.”
CREST OF VETA MOUNTAIN.