WILLIAMS CAÑON, NEAR MANITOU, COLORADO
One of the noted excursions of the Pike's Peak region is the "Temple Drive,"—a carriage road beginning in Manitou, traversing Williams Cañon, and, climbing its west wall. The drive offers near views of the Temple of Isis, the Cathedral of St. Peter, the Narrows, and of St. Peter's Gate in the Cathedral Dome. It is fairly a drive in elfland, and is as distinctive a feature of Colorado Springs life as is the famous drive from Naples to Amalfi and Sorrento a feature of the enchantment of Southern Italy. Manitou Park is easily reached by motor or carriage drive from Colorado Springs through the picturesque Ute Pass, and aside from its beauty it has an added interest in having been presented to Colorado College by General William J. Palmer and Dr. William A. Bell, to be used as the field laboratory of the new Colorado School of Forestry. Manitou Park contains cottages and recreation halls, so that all sorts of hospitalities and entertainments can be there enjoyed.
Of the "Garden of the Gods" who can analyze the curious, mystic spell of the place? A large tract of rolling mesas is covered with these uncanny monsters of rocks in all weird and grotesque forms. The deep red sandstone of their formation gives it the aspect, under a midday sun or the slanting rays of a brilliant sunset, of being all on fire—a kind of inferno, foreign to earth, and revealed, momentarily, from some underworld of mystery.
Cheyenne Cañon is one of the most poetically touched places in all the Pike's Peak region. Of Cheyenne mountain Helen Hunt Jackson wrote:
"By easy slope to west, as if it had
No thought, when first its soaring was begun,
Except to look devoutly to the sun,
It rises and has risen, until glad,
With light as with a garment it is clad,
Each dawn before the tardy plains have won