Hell Gate, on the Colorado Midland Railway.
The San Luis Park is the last and largest of these unique mountain amphitheaters, and lies in the southern portion of the state. It surrounds a beautiful lake of the same name, some sixty miles in length, and into which run nineteen streams. The San Luis Lake has no known outlet, but in the respect of being fresh and not salt it departs from the usual rule of lakes with no outflowing waters. This area of about 18,000 square miles, included in San Luis Park, is among the choicest known for the uses of civilization. It was the only portion of what is now Colorado that was to any great extent permanently occupied by the Mexicans. About 25,000 of them lived here when our occupancy began, and fully that number of their descendants are there still. It was into this region that one Lieut. Zebulon M. Pike, of the United States army, blindly wandered while he was surveying interior Louisiana—how strangely the matter-of-fact old story reads now—and was politely taken in and escorted to the capital, the opulent and ancient Santa Fe, and much further elsewhere. He died in battle at last, a soldier and the son of a soldier, and this little excursion into wilds absolutely unknown so short a time ago gave him the most colossal and enduring of monuments—Pike’s Peak.
In this beautiful region—where, besides the nineteen streams that feed San Luis Lake, sixteen others flow into the Rio Grande, here a little white mountain stream newly born—it is surprising how little great elevation affects trees, grass and flowers. It is an all-the-year cattle country at almost any height. Big trees grow 10,000 feet above the sea. Cereals and the tender vegetables thrive at 7,000 feet, and potatoes at 8,000. Beautiful flowers and all the grasses are found at 11,000, and the pines and firs are of fair size at 11,500 feet.
It is singular the discriminating eye for a good thing the early Spaniard had, here and in California, especially the padres. They knew it when they saw it, and took it and kept it for a considerable time. And then we got it—always. And they accept us as neighbors and fellow-citizens and lawmakers without any ill-will, and keep on doing just as they always did, and as their ancestors did in Spain four hundred years ago.
When the reader has assimilated the idea of these Colorado parks he is left only one other mental task—to conceive of all the rest as a piled-up succession of panoramas. Behind each other, far into the purple distance, the ranges lie tier upon tier. The valleys that lie between, great and small, number thousands. There are in Colorado two hundred and sixty snow-born small streams, but large enough to have each a name. There are nine named lakes. There are sixty-three rivers. Besides some seventy peaks that are still unnamed there are about one hundred and fifty towering domes that have names already given.
Amid these general scenes lie half-hidden those that are particularly beautiful; the nooks and corners where one wonders grudgingly when one comes upon them if they have lain there through the ages, and have been as beautiful as they are to-day, wasted, so to speak, in a world where gems are so very rare. There is an impression, held without warrant, but natural, that these places have charms, yes, but that they are overrated and overwritten after the manner of western efflorescence and the frontier desire to surprise. The truth is that quite such scenes and places do not exist elsewhere in all the world; that when white men first saw some of them they were unable to convey to others any adequate idea of them by means of even their own picturesque vocabulary. Since then, and always, the same difficulty exists, because in the inadequacy of mere descriptive words the idea becomes confused, and exaggeration is taken for granted. There is a natural reason why hundreds of men and women should go to Colorado, should meet there a revelation of natural beauty that leaves them permanently affected, and yet should speak of their experiences only to each other. It is useless to talk, or, alas! to write.
Sopris Peak, near Aspen, as seen from the Valley. 12,972 feet high.
CHAPTER III.
The Colorado Pleasure Ground—Manitou.
When the Colorado visitor comes for the first time he is fortunate if his approach is by one of those lines whose trains, like those of the Burlington, come careering across the high plains from the eastward at an hour that shows the notched and serrated mountain wall against the sky. There is no other mountain approach in the world like that to Colorado from the east. Here is the sudden ending of that wide and silent vastness in which the modern traveler now lives less than twenty-four hours, but which the old-time wanderer dwelt in for more than a month. To reach this mountain world, ending abruptly at the plain, is a surprise. Let one ray of sunshine lie upon a peak, far in the distance, and it is known that the fleecy texture of a cloud could not give back that peculiar glint, cold and bright and half a frown, and that these huge shapes are, at last, the Rocky Mountains. Such a glimpse may not occur to the railway traveler once in a hundred journeys, but if seen it is a suggestion of the spires that Bunyan saw; the Beulah that lies beyond the river.