Colorado Outings
BY JAMES STEELE.
ISSUED BY THE PASSENGER DEPARTMENT
BURLINGTON ROUTE,
CHICAGO.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY
THE CHICAGO, BURLINGTON & QUINCY
RAILROAD COMPANY.
A Colorado Mountain View—The Mount of the Holy Cross, as seen from near Leadville.
Colorado Outings.
CHAPTER I.
Glimpses of a Mountain World.
Colorado—for thirty years no geographical name has been oftener written in connection with the phrases that express height, vastness, space, clearness and a colossal beauty that never wearies or changes or grows old. Hundreds of books, millions of words, have described its scenes. Many thousands have visited it. Endowed with a beauty of fascinating awfulness, and with still another beauty that underlies the magnitude and sits serene amid the grandeur, the inadequate, word-trammeled idea of it has found endless expression, and yet the scenes of Colorado have never been described. Whoever has visited her ever after turns aside from words; whoever has not, can obtain from them but a faint conception of that which in truth can be imagined only in actual presence—and hardly even then.
Yet it seems necessary that maps should be drawn, and details written out, and the camera be called upon to reproduce the stupendous microscopic detail, and that magnificence should find a biographer and be put into figures that in the presence of the reality are almost meaningless. For it is a work-a-day world. The questions of time, distance, convenience, cost, possibility, cannot be barred from their foreordained connection in the human mind with even the magnificence that was builded by the æons; the beauty whose mother was cosmos.