Imagine the outward opening of Ute Pass—a cleft in the undulating mountain wall extending backward and upward. It opened into the plain, as Pike’s tattered wanderers first saw it, in V-shape, and in this notch bubbled three or four peculiar springs. There was no one there. The antelope and buffalos from the plains, and the black-tailed deer and elks from the mountains came there to drink. The Utes trailed down the rocky cañon that bears their name, single file, afoot, and camped beside the springs. One of them went out to the edge of the mesa, east toward Colorado Springs and lay down on his naked stomach and peeped out over the plain from behind a sage bush, and was on picket duty there to watch lest the plains Apache catch his kindred unaware.
Car and Engine used in the Ascent of Pike’s Peak by the Cog Railroad.
The waters bubbled as they rose, and had a faint sweetish taste, and the savages, and all who have since tasted them, liked them well. They were “medicine waters,” too. There is a pleasant supposition that these painted savages named the place “Manitou”—a name used by the Indians of Cooper and tradition to express the idea of a spirit, God or Devil, indifferently. It is a pretty name in sound, and the legend does not the slightest harm. In reality, the Utes owned these unknown mountains in large part, and they also liked to hunt buffalo on the plains, and they passed this place in their migrations because it was convenient and they were thirsty. All that is left of them now is their one supposed word, “Manitou.”
Then, as now, the strange wind-wrought obelisks of the Garden of the Gods stood near at hand, and in the trail the huge Balanced Rock seemed waiting to be pushed to its fall by some passing child. Then, as now, the gateway, guarded by its red perpendicular portals, springing more than three hundred feet straight up from the level plain, stood open. The clefts in the mountain’s flank that are called the north and south Cheyenne Cañons were there as now, and the cascade that falls in seven leaps five hundred feet in the southern cañon was there, it is almost difficult to believe, precisely as it is to-day and as it has been for ages. All the trees were there; the Douglas spruce, the Rocky Mountain pine, the Picea Grandis, the creepers, the mauve and white clematis, and, over all, towering and inaccessible, the red granite walls.
The twin cañon to the northward held its tumbling waters too, and Seven Lakes, Monument Park, Rainbow Falls, Manitou Park, Williams’ Cañon, Cave of the Winds, Engleman’s Cañon, Red Cañon, Crystal Park, Glen Eyrie—all these were the same as now, but unnamed and almost unnoted. Nothing in the modern world is ever done until a railroad comes.
Yet there has been a change; as great a change as the ingenuity of man can make in everlasting things. The Manitou Grand Caverns have been discovered and opened, precisely as though nature had not been lavish enough before, and must needs do some other brilliant thing through man’s accident and luck. Wagon roads have been graded in all directions, and from one famous place to another, until there is no pleasure ground in America, possibly in the world, so well equipped for out-of-doors pleasure in a climate that has no vicissitudes, and amid remarkable scenes that have been clustered around this one favored spot with a profusion unknown elsewhere in all the civilized world.
To South Cheyenne Cañon from Manitou it is nine miles; to North Cheyenne Cañon eight and one-half; from the mouth of the cañon to the Rainbow Falls and Grand Caverns it is one and one-half miles, and every visitor wishes it was further, because it is a road of rugged sweetness quite unequaled; to Red Cañon it is three miles; to Crystal Park, three; to the Garden of the Gods, three—a drive lovely as pleasure knows, with an extraordinary scene at the end of it; to Glen Eyrie it is five miles; to Monument Park by “trail”—which is native for a fine riding road—it is seven and one-half miles; by carriage road it is nine miles; to Seven Lakes, again by trail, it is nine miles; to the summit of Pike’s Peak, this time by the Cog Road, it is nine wonderful miles, with an elevation rarely attained in this life at the end of it; to the same by trail it is thirteen miles. There are four ways of going up this mountain, to climb which was a few years ago a remarkable feat—afoot, horseback, by carriage and by rail. All these ways are practised, according to the spirit and physical condition of the visitor. The bicycle, for only this once, is not included.
These are some of the show places, the world-renowned scenes about which there cannot easily be any exaggeration. People linger among them for months, and go to them again and again.
But in addition to these there are scores of mountain nooks and corners; cañons, caves, waterfalls; private places that the visitor seeks out or casually finds for himself. There are acres, and quarter and half acres that have been discovered hundreds of times, and are owned, practically without cost, by the finder for so long as he lingers amid these scenes. There may be sometimes a pair, to whom the place is a joint-stock enterprise.