Our rambles through Middle Park had been so pleasant that it was with some reluctance we turned our steps eastward again, to pursue the work of photographing scenery in more southerly fields. We reached Sunset after an absence of twelve days, and were soon after switched on to the North Branch of the Union Pacific for Denver. Thence, our route was south to Colorado Springs and Manitou, where, as the following chapter will show, we repeated our delightful experiences in Middle Park, and saw even greater wonders.
IN THE CAÑON OF GRAND RIVER, COLORADO.
CHAPTER II.
MANITOU, THE MIGHTY!
THE SEAL AND BEAR, GARDEN OF THE GODS.
The glory of Colorado, in the splendor of its waterfalls, the awesomeness of its mountains, the wealth of its mines, and the picturesqueness of its natural parks, is by no means confined to those Rocky Mountain districts which we have just pictured and described, for greater marvels remain to be spoken of, and pictorially represented. Returning to Denver, our tour took us southward, across a plain that hugs the gnarled bosom of the Continental Divide, by the pearl of Palmer Lake, and on to Colorado Springs and Manitou, the twin cities that sit at the feet of Pike’s Peak. Here we are compelled to pause in a spell of mighty wonderment before the amazing prodigies of a riotously eccentric nature, that bursts into an exuberance of dashing cascades, top-lofty mountains, darkling cañons, gruesome formations, monolithic spires, babbling brooks and magnetic springs. Here are God’s acres of tumultuous stone, grand, amazing, chaotic, aberrant; a pantheon of forces, a Jovian council, a mythologic assemblage that sits like a Sanhedrim on the issues of Titanic upheaval, erosion, conglomeration and elemental disturbance. There, rising like a giant specter above its lesser brothers, and dipping its hoary head into the milky baldric of the heavens, stands Pike’s Peak, the grand old sentinel of millenniums, with sides gashed by tumbling cataracts and yellow with quivering leaves of the frosted aspen. So lofty that the stars can almost whisper to it, and the clouds, when tired of sailing through the sky, circle and settle upon its peak, while eternal night sleeps undisturbed, save by the lion’s call, in the deep gorges that split its base.