The lowest part of the park is 7,500 feet high. The summer midday is very warm, but every night is cool, almost cold. People live there and farm and there is no lack of either accommodation or hospitality. Still it is isolated, with the charm of nature utterly unbroken, a good place to fish and near the best remaining hunting grounds, perhaps, after all, the loveliest summer-time resting place in all this wonderland of nature.
A Mountain Hotel—The Half-Way House on the carriage road up Pike’s Peak.
All this northern region of which Estes Park is the gem calls loudly to that large class who imagine they have enough of society at home, and who wish for two or three blissful summer weeks to go where the Red Gods call them; to fish, or hunt, or to lie under pines and blink at the mottled sunshine, forgetful of newspapers and telegrams, and stiff collars and polished boots. Of such as these are the churls who build railroads and conduct enterprises and write real books, and torment their days with action and their nights with thinking. Some of these shamelessly bestow their women folk and their young men at Glenwood or Manitou, or elsewhere beneath a mingling of mountain shadows and electric lights, and then abscond with other temporary satyrs like unto themselves to Estes Park and places even further away.
And there is a line of travel thus far, and amid many other enforced omissions, not mentioned at all. It is operated by the Denver & Rio Grande road, and may be said to begin at that point mentioned in a preceding chapter, a little station beyond Salida, where in the early morning a train mysteriously vanishes within a side cañon, seemingly on a prospecting tour amid unknown depths and distances. The tour of this train they call familiarly “Around the Circle”—a circle several hundred miles in circumference.
This journey traverses the San Luis Park. It crosses the southern boundary line into New Mexico and throws out an attenuated and very crooked arm to Santa Fe, in the heart of a civilization that is the oldest and quaintest in America. One would hardly credit the fact that at the moment of disappearance this vanishing train is crossing the huge northern rim of San Luis Park, and that emerging on the inner side it proceeds to make a beeline, without a curve, across this vast mountain amphitheater for a distance of fifty-six miles. While crookedness is a wonder elsewhere, it is straightness that is a wonder here, and this unwonted tangent is deliberately mentioned as a curious thing. The grades immediately precedent were two hundred and eleven feet to the mile, and the look downward and backward through Poncha Pass was something as indescribable as any scene in Colorado. But it may be added that this is the longest stretch of straight railroad track, not alone in Colorado, but in the world.
On this circle route lies the famous Toltec Gorge, where the train crosses the range at an elevation of 10,015 feet. The line passes the corner of the Ute and Apache Indian reservations, and the aborigine has never lost his interest in the still inexplicable power that was the principal indirect cause of his being placed at last in this corner of the realm he once owned. He sits in the sun and waits for the train.
There is a place where the line is laid on a shelf in a cañon that is five hundred feet from the bottom and five hundred feet from the top, and where the cost of construction for a single mile was $115,000.
At Mancos station the ethnologically inclined may stop and visit the ruins of the cliff dwellers in Mancos Cañon. Rico, Lost Cañon, the Valley of the Dolores, Rio de Las Animas Perdidas—“the River of the Lost Souls”—the queer, sharp pinnacles known as the Needle Mountains, Sultan Mountain, Lizard Head Pass, Trout Lake, the celebrated piece of engineering known as Ophir Loop, the Black Cañon, are all places on this “circle” journey.
