Ophir lies fifteen miles east of Silverton and on the Pacific slope, for it is at one source of the Rio Dolores. It is reached by a wagon-road up Mineral Creek, which is one of the most “scenic routes” I know of in Colorado. At first there is not much to call forth admiration; nearing the top, however, a remarkable picture presents itself. In a closely guarding circle of purplish peaks, stand two isolated mountains of entirely different character and most striking appearance. Instead of the vertical cliffs, serrated and splintered summits and ragged gray of the majority of the mountains, these are as rounded and smooth on top as if they had been shaved by a lawn mower, and rise in unbroken slopes far above the blackish masses of timber which closely envelope their bases. It is their color, however, that makes them so grandly conspicuous. Long strokes of orange and rust color extend up and down from the spruces to the apex, streaked with bright red and set off with upright lines of glowing yellow, all softly blended together and crossed by a crowd of hair-lines, wavy and level with the horizon, like the plumage of a canvas-back duck. Stand where you will on the eastern side of this divide between the Animas and the San Miguel, and these great, smooth, cushiony hills of red, tower up level with your eye, burning under the sunlight.
At last the road rises above timber line, but even to the last verge, the soil under the trees is crowded with flowers and all sorts of pretty herbage, among which the strawberry takes precedence in point of abundance. Then the track lies underneath beetling cliffs which have crumbled into long tall, and the pass itself is only the triangular depression between two opposite slides. On one side here the rock is brown and broken almost as fine as railway ballast; on the other the fragments rule much larger in size, are of bluish trachyte and completely covered everywhere with a stone-lichen hardly thicker than paint, which gives them a decidedly green color, while the brown rocks opposite are entirely devoid of lichens.
Down this jumble of fallen rocks—the scene of one incessant slow avalanche from the weather-crumbled crests still remaining above—the road passes by a steep and tortuous grade, made somewhat smooth by filling the crevices with small stuff; but the result would make the ghost of McAdam turn a shade paler.
These vast “slides” are a prominent feature in every landscape in southern Colorado. The volcanic rock with which all the mountains are capped, has a natural cleavage in two directions, and rapidly disintegrates, even under the air. On the quiet, still days of midsummer, you continually hear the rattle of pieces of rock which have fallen untouched from some scarp or pinnacle, and are racing down the steep talus below. The winter, however, is the time of greatest destruction. Into the thousand cracks and crannies the rains and snows of autumn pour floods of water, which penetrate the inmost recesses of the well-seamed crags. Then comes a frost. The little veins and pockets of water expand with a sudden force, combined and irresistible. Perhaps some huge projection of cliff flies to pieces as though filled full of exploding dynamite; perhaps a stronger body of frost behind it pries off the whole mass at once, and it dashes head-long down the side of the mountain, to scatter widely its cracked shell and leave the core a huge bowlder, which crashes its way far into the struggling woods at the foot of the rough slope. This process goes on, season after season, until finally the thousands of feet of summit, which once towered proudly above the mountain’s base, have been crumbled down to a level with the top of the debris-slope. If the rock is very soft, then the process goes on with each fallen block, until it is reduced to soil and forms a smooth, grassy slope, or a clean shaven but barren slide, like the rich red hills we saw on the other side of Lookout; but if the fragments are hard, then gradually the bushes and grass will creep up, and the forest will follow as high as climate and snow-fall will let it grow, and above will be a rounded crest of broken lava, like Veta mountain—the worst thing to climb in the wide world.
From the long, slanting niche which lets the road down across this broken and sliding rock, where men are always at work to throw aside the ceaselessly falling crumbs of the cliff, one gets his first view of Ophir gulch,—a valley half a dozen miles in length, without an acre of level ground in the whole of it. This end is closed by Lookout mountain, the opposite by the lofty crags of Mt. Wilson. On the north, Silver mountain cuts the sky in ragged outline, and, braced against its base, Yellow mountain rises straight from the creek-side to an almost equal altitude. In the crevice between stand the score or so of log cabins, which constitute what many persons consider the liveliest camp in the whole San Juan.
It is only eight years since the value of this locality was made known, but now the mountains on both sides of the gulch are pitted like a pepper-box with prospecting tunnels, and there are perhaps twenty mines shipping ore in profitable quantities, even under the great disadvantages of their isolation. The leads in general run northeast and southwest, but good openings have been found all the way from the brink of the creek to the shattered combing that casts its ragged shadow down the long, white slopes. Systematic development has been carried on in very few mines as yet, but the indications promise great things for the future. Half a dozen gold workings in particular are very rich, and several sales have been made exceeding $50,000 for a single location.
Remounting, the ride homeward through the mellow afternoon, was very delightful. The mountains rose on either side high above where the hardiest trees could manage to exist, gorgeously stained in great chevrons of red, orange and rust yellow. Lookout and its brother peaks seemed vast stacks of triangles, all upright and baseless, backed with long slides of varied umber tints. On some of these slides the grass has grown, long tongues of it penetrating far toward the bright walls overhead, while elsewhere mile-wide slopes of grayish white lie untouched by any blemish or projection. Everything is triangular,—the outlines of the peaks and the reverse in the gorges between; the shape of the fallen fragments; of the long spear-points of verdure that climb them, and of the trees and even the separate leaves that blend into those acute green patches; of the broad strokes of vivid color that have been painted so lavishly on these splendid slopes; even of the splitting and cleavage of every cliff-face and toppling spire that glistens in the slanting light and throws a slender-pointed shadow across the velvet brim of the valley.
Backward, where the forests lie unbroken on the southern wall of the gulch, long ranks and patches of aspens were interspersed with the reigning evergreens, and these the frosts had touched with various hues from its full palette—bright green still where the leaves were protected, yellow on the warm side of the ridges, vivid orange and scarlet along the crests,—so that these patches glowed like red and yellow flame against the dark spruces and firs.
Near timber-line there is a remarkable picture. Down from the northern mountain there trickle reddish streamlets over a space several rods in width. A few yards below the road all this water collects itself into a basin, which, begun by some trivial obstruction, has been able to build up its walls by slow deposition, until a great iron tank, with walls twenty-five or thirty feet high, and several feet thick, contains all but a trickling overflow of the mineral water. This tank is surrounded with pretty trees, and its wavy red outline holds a fountain as richly green as an emerald; or blue if you look at it from some one of the surrounding heights, so that the Spanish way of calling a spring ojo—an eye—seems very natural.
Beyond this highly tinted natural reservoir, built out like a balcony on the steep hillside, you look across to undulating verdant knolls, where shapely trees are scattered thinly, up beyond a deep maroon slope, falling from a noble, iron brown bluff, and so on away to the gray and lofty peaks, in whose rifts and vertical gorges the shadow lies blue as the farther edge of the sea, and whose clustering, cumulative spires, culminate in gleaming apices of snow.