HELL GATE, AUSABLE CHASM.
CHAPTER III.
THE GRAND CAÑONS OF WESTERN RIVERS.
CRYSTAL FALLS, CASCADE CAÑON.
Having pretty thoroughly photographed the region roundabout Manitou, we hitched our camera car to a train on the Colorado Midland and started westward for Salt Lake, and to embalm the scenery that lay between. The way led around the base of Pike’s Peak, passed Cascade Cañon, and along Bear Creek, the road doubling upon itself and twisting around in the most tortuous course imaginable in order to get through the mountain defiles. Every foot of the route is grand, for there is no point that does not offer a view of scenic splendors beautiful, awesome and sublime. So rugged, tumultuous and wonderfully aberrant is the way, that the road plunges through no less than eight tunnels in traversing as many miles, and thus the traveler is whirled through the heart and arms of the mountains. The approach to Green Mountain Falls is up a valley which spreads out into a fascinating landscape, where the green of the meadowlands is set in a brown frame of sky-piercing peaks and impending cliffs. Fontaine River refreshes the glade that opens through the towering range, and a little way from the town the water goes leaping down Foster’s Falls in a sheet of liquid crystal. It is from this cascade that Green Mountain Falls takes its name. But besides this deep dash of broken water, there are many other beautiful falls in the vicinity which have served to make of the place a popular resort, indeed, one of the greatest in Colorado.
Onward we speed through valleys aflame with flowers and noisy with the laughter of gamboling streams, until, seventy miles from Colorado Springs, we plunge into a gorge known by its length as Eleven-Mile Cañon. It lies directly in the way to South Park, and is wonderful not so much for its darkling depths as for its marvelous petrifactions and other natural curiosities; its great masses of granite that have broken away from the peaks above and become a wall to the turbulent torrent that has cleft the mountains on its bridleless way to the sea. Thence our train winds around, up hill, past lakes, trout streams, and ranches, until we stop a while at Buena Vista, where the train pauses on the side of Gold Hill Mountain, fully one thousand feet above the town. From this natural observatory a beautiful view is had indeed: Below is the madly-rushing Arkansas, and the silvery Cottonwood Creek that joins its waters with the river at this point. Buena Vista is in a valley that glows like an emerald in the sun, across which rises a giant bank of mountains known as the Saguache range, in which we distinguish the collegiate trinity of mounts Harvard, Yale and Princeton, each being above 14,000 feet, and the former the second highest in the Rocky Mountains. Snowy and Sangre de Cristo ranges are also visible from this point, while eleven miles up Cottonwood Pass is Cottonwood Lake, a very gem set in a wilderness of snow-covered peaks. It is the same distance from Buena Vista to the summit of Mt. Princeton, reached by an easy wagon road, and on this lofty pedestal the observer sweeps the horizon with enraptured vision that commands a view of Salida, Poncha Pass, the wide expanse of South Park, and grand old Pike’s Peak one hundred miles away; Twin Lakes are twenty-five miles to the north, near Buffalo Peaks, where the sportsman finds a paradise and the health-seeker is exhilarated with balsamic winds; while all around, whichever way we look, the omnipotence of the Creator is exhibited in the mightiness of His handiwork as displayed in the weirdly broken landscape of jocund mountain peaks, bowlders of granite torn from the great heart of the earth, babbling streams, tumbling water-falls, and teeming valleys.