CHAPTER IV.
The Colorado Pleasure Grounds, II.
The “Loop” Journey.
In almost the opposite direction from that which takes the visitor to Manitou, and still near the eastern rim of the mountains, is one cañon that can be visited from Denver in a day. It lies upon one of the lines of the U. P., D. & G. road, and is known as Clear Creek Cañon.
This defile in the mountains has been long known. When Colorado was young it was a miners’ wagon road over the range. Tens of thousands have seen it, and it still remains, especially to one who has no time to see the overpowering scenery in the interior, an experience not to be left out.
From Denver it is fifteen miles to Golden, which is the simple name of a town, one of the original gold camps, over a stretch of country that was once an inlet of the great plains sea, and is as level as the Nebraska prairie. It is a fruit, farm and ranch country, suggesting nothing of the scene that is so near at hand. The basin in which the town lies is the bottom of this sea, and the rocks around the shore are water worn, and show where the waves once lapped. But a little distance beyond lies the opening to this famous gorge and its tumbling stream, and thence the road follows it for more than twenty miles.
The place, like most cañons, is apparently a cooling crock; a place that opened in the shrinking of the crust when the white-hot world began to harden. The projections of one side vaguely fit the indentations of the other. Very often the red walls come very close together, revealing, as one looks upward, only a narrow blue streak where the sky is.
Imagination, and a desire to have a place of beginning in detailed descriptive writing, have given these rugged rock faces peculiar resemblances, and fantastic names. They become faces, bold profiles, fairy castles. But the dignity of the place does not bear out any of these similitudes. Its charm lies in a general massive beauty; a something that is feebly expressed by the word “grandeur.” This is enhanced by the fact that one is there at the bottom of the gorge, and can look upward to dizzy heights that are constantly changing before the eye. There are places where the sun does not shine; others where the walls widen a little and one catches a glimpse of white peaks far off. Foaming along the bottom runs Clear Creek—now often of a color far from clear because of its admixture with tailings from extensive mining operations far toward its head. It is useless, here or elsewhere, to try to describe these Colorado torrents. They make a picture upon the inner consciousness, and one can shut his eyes long afterward and see and hear them. But they have no technique; only some human picture has that; and they are not the proper subjects of the inadequate things we know as words. All that a distant reader can be asked to do is to imagine a plain suddenly estopped by a red wall of rocks. In this wall a narrow gateway; a square, sheer opening, and into this he glides. After the entrance the walls grow higher and higher, and for half a day he is seated in a gliding box with a roaring torrent beneath or beside him, and these vast walls fencing him in on both sides. There are hundreds of sharp turns, and often the sides of his upholstered gliding box almost touch the wall. There is no opening but that which is toward the sky. For countless ages only these foaming waters broke the silence here. It is interrupted now only by the feeble clank of the wheel upon the rail—the wheel and rail that are, after all is said, the only powers that may not be daunted by such scenes.
In the V-shaped opening at the western end of Clear Creek Cañon lies Idaho Springs, a mining town, where, if these scenes are new to the visitor, odd glimpses may be caught of a life and traffic to most of the world unknown. The surrounding hills are marked with white spots high up, and these scars are almost countless. Mining is everything, and everywhere, and scenery is incidental. But Idaho Springs, as its name might indicate, is also a health resort. The springs consist of both hot and cold mineral water, and there is a natural vapor bath and boiling springs. The climate is celebrated even in Colorado.
Country Road Bridge over the Uncompahgre River—Western Colorado.
Fourteen miles further westward is Georgetown, and the road thither is simply an extension of the Clear Creek Cañon, here taking the form of a sloping-sided and very narrow valley. The town has a population of nearly four thousand people. These mountain towns, sheltered by the high ranges, have all a more equable climate than Denver. There is hardly one that is not both a winter and summer health resort. Strong men who came to this country many years ago with weak lungs, seeking the one great desideratum of a climate where they could live all the year out of doors, have gone wherever occupation and circumstances drew them in the mountains, and are conscious as a rule of no great difference in locality within certain well-defined and very wide lines. Winter does not interfere with any industry of the country. The sheltered valley, wherever it lies in central and southern Colorado, at least, furnishes a residence for that large class who would surely die in two years in the east, who know that fact, and who live here in health until they are old.