Monument Valley Park is the latest of General Palmer's munificent gifts to Colorado Springs. It was a tract of low waste land some two miles in length and covering an area of two hundred or more acres, but its transformation into the present beautiful park is the realization of an Aladdin's dream. An artistic stone drinking-fountain; a wide vista of trees relieved by a low Italian basin with fountains; Monument Creek, made to be sixty feet wide between its banks; the creation of artificial lakes; and there are included in the scheme conservatories, rustic pavilions, and botanical gardens. This park is one of the most extensive improvements in decorative effect, that is known in any city.
Monument Park is distinctive from Monument Valley Park, the former lying some ten miles from the city, and it is picturesque beyond words.
The "Garden of the Gods" has achieved world-wide fame. The "Gateway," the "Cathedral Spires," "Balanced Rock," and other singular formations fascinate the visitor and draw him back again and again. A local writer thus describes the majestic "Gateway":
"Two immense slabs of red sandstone, soft and beautiful in their coloring, tower over three hundred feet high on either side and seem to challenge the right of the stranger to enter the sacred portals. Napoleon, at the Pyramids, sought to impress his soldiers with the thought that from that eminence four thousand years looked down upon them. But from here geological ages of untold length look down upon the beholder. In close proximity may be found limestone, gypsum, white sandstone, and red sandstone, each representing a different geological era, and each, in all probability, representing millions of years in its formation."
The "Garden of the Gods" represents one of those inexplicable epochs of Nature's creations as does, only in a more marvellous degree, the Grand Cañon and the Petrified Forest. A scientist says of these grotesque shapes that "their strangely garish colors, red and yellow and white, in enormous masses, lofty buttresses, towers and pinnacles, besides formations of lesser size, in fantastic shapes, that readily lend themselves to the imagination, are sedimentary strata, which once lay horizontally upon the mountain's breast, but that some gigantic convulsion of nature threw them into their present perpendicular attitude, with their roots, as it were, extending hundreds of feet underground. The erosion of water, when this was all the Gulf of Mexico, accounts for the shaping.
"The gateway to the Garden is really the grandest feature, rising perpendicularly on either side twice the height of Niagara, and framing in rich terra cotta a most entrancing picture of the blue and tawny peak, apparently only a little way on the other side."
GATEWAY OF THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO
CATHEDRAL SPIRES, GARDEN OF THE GODS, COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO