Enthusiasm sometimes exaggerates the reality, just as colored glass confuses the sight; but when it serves to please without doing harm, the fault may be pardoned. To the enthusiasm of the occasion, and our great and unique enterprise, may therefore be charged the burst of admiration that manifested our feelings, when, rolling along the prairies on the Union Pacific R. R., we saw, rising far to the southwest, nearly one hundred miles away, the broad shoulders of Pike’s Peak, breaking into russet above the clouds and showing a head of saffron, mellowed by the soft rays of a sun just falling into the deep valleys of the Occident. It was the chief object to chain our attention for the while, and this first impression awakened most delightful anticipations of the work which lay before us. A few hours later we were in Denver, making final preparations for a photographing tour of the picturesque West. Fortunately, our arrangements were so nearly complete upon leaving St. Louis that only a short stay in Denver was necessary, and it was with eager desire that we had our car attached to a Union Pacific train and started for the heart of the Rockies. The long range of mountains, rising into sharp peaks, and again spreading their tops into truncated cones, elbowing and pushing each other like a brigade in too close quarters at parade-rest, are only fifteen miles from Denver, forming a grand background to an immense expanse of prairie landscape. Starting on the Colorado Central Branch of the Union Pacific, we soon pass through the gate-way of the Rockies; thence on to Golden, a beautiful mining town that nestles in the bed of a dried-up lake, and looks up with pleasing satisfaction to the guardian gods of North and South Table Mountains. Here a stop is made for a trip up Bear Creek Cañon, which is reached by stage, by which conveyance the traveler is trundled into a gorge of surpassing beauty and noble grandeur. Through this great gash the water dashes, swollen by melting snows, and fed by a thousand sources. On either side the frowning and dusky walls, weaving a tortuous way like the path of a drunken giant, rear up their castellated heads until they remind us of the walled cities of Jericho, over which Joshua’s spies were lowered by Rahab.
MARSHALL FALLS, CLEAR CREEK CAÑON.
Only a few miles from Golden is Clear Creek Cañon, another wondrous cleavage wrought by water that goes tumbling through the passage with rumble of breakers and roar of waterfall. The walls of the cañon rise perpendicularly to varying heights of 500 to 1,500 feet, and at places approach so near to each other that an observer looking upward from the cavernous depths can see only a thin strip of blue sky. Away up on the brows of the parallel cliffs are large trees that look like feather dusters, and little streams of liquid silver appear in the distance to be pouring their contributions from crevice and apex to swell the mad creek that rushes with complaining voice down the age-swept gorge. Along this water-bed was formerly the roadway, or trail, used by freight-wagons and stage-coaches, but it is now become the exclusive thoroughfare of the Central Branch, so that the magnificent view which the cañon affords is before the eyes of railroad travelers.
Less than three miles from Georgetown is Green Lake, an exquisite body of water which has been very appropriately called the Gem of the Mountain. Its translucent depths are animated by myriads of trout that are tinged by the green waters to the color of emeralds, while away down in its profound recesses is distinguishable a forest of stately trees which has been swept into the lake by some glacial avalanche. Not a branch appears to have been broken or a position disturbed, for the trees stand boldly upright in all their original gracefulness, but through calcareous depositions, that are a peculiarity of this lake, they have been converted into stone. Thus it is a submerged forest of petrified trees.
Looking beyond the lake we perceive, some seven miles away, the famous Argenta Pass, the summit of which is reached by the highest wagon-road in the world, and from this elevation an almost boundless and marvelously picturesque view may be had, stretching away to the west as far as Holy Cross Mount, and eastward to the prairies of Kansas.
A VIEW OF PIKE’S PEAK.