Colorado Outings
BY JAMES STEELE.
ISSUED BY THE PASSENGER DEPARTMENT
BURLINGTON ROUTE,
CHICAGO.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY
THE CHICAGO, BURLINGTON & QUINCY
RAILROAD COMPANY.
A Colorado Mountain View—The Mount of the Holy Cross,as seen from near Leadville.
Colorado Outings.
CHAPTER I.
Glimpses of a Mountain World.
Colorado—for thirty years no geographical name has been oftenerwritten in connection with the phrases that express height, vastness, space,clearness and a colossal beauty that never wearies or changes or grows old.Hundreds of books, millions of words, have described its scenes. Manythousands have visited it. Endowed with a beauty of fascinating awfulness,and with still another beauty that underlies the magnitude and sitsserene amid the grandeur, the inadequate, word-trammeled idea of it hasfound endless expression, and yet the scenes of Colorado have never beendescribed. Whoever has visited her ever after turns aside from words;whoever has not, can obtain from them but a faint conception of that whichin truth can be imagined only in actual presence—and hardly even then.
Yet it seems necessary that maps should be drawn, and details writtenout, and the camera be called upon to reproduce the stupendous microscopicdetail, and that magnificence should find a biographer and be put into figuresthat in the presence of the reality are almost meaningless. For it is awork-a-day world. The questions of time, distance, convenience, cost, possibility,cannot be barred from their foreordained connection in the humanmind with even the magnificence that was builded by the æons; the beautywhose mother was cosmos.
Imagine, to begin with, the extent of this piece of scenery. Coloradocontains 104,500 square miles—66,880,000 acres. Of this vast area—as bigas all New England with Illinois added—two-thirds is mountains. Notsuch as claim that name in Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia and the Carolinas,but Titanic. The height of the average Alleghanies and of the BlueRidge is perhaps 2,500 feet. The famed peaks of the chain may rise sometimesto 5,000 feet. Katahdin is 5,385 feet high, and there are others 3,400,2,800, etc. The thirteen peaks of Mount Desert Island and vicinity arefrom 1,000 to 2,800 feet high. Mount Agamenticus is a hill that claims 670feet. Kearsarge, historic name, has only 3,250 feet. The Peaks of Otter, inVirginia, climb to 4,200 feet.
They might all be lost in this Coloradoand never be found again. The state istraversed by the main chain of the Rockies,the oft-quoted “backbone of thecontinent,” the huge rooftree ofour republic, prolific mother ofrivers, this great watershed givesrise to the Rio Grande, the twoPlattes, the Arkansas, the riversof central Kansas, the Coloradothat in Arizona passes for twohundred miles between thosesheer red walls that are thescenic wonder of the world, and flowsat last into foreign seas.
Out of this mighty chain and its flanks rise thepeaks beside which most of the serenest heightsof the common world are as hillocks; Pike’s,Gray’s, Long’s, Lincoln, Ouray, Grant, Sherman,Yale, Harvard, Dome, Spanish Peaks, the Wet Mountains; and scores ofothers