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Colorado Outings
BY JAMES STEELE.
ISSUED BY THE PASSENGER DEPARTMENT
BURLINGTON ROUTE,
CHICAGO.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY
THE CHICAGO, BURLINGTON & QUINCY
RAILROAD COMPANY.
[Illustration: 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 oftener written
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.
Many thousands have visited it. Endowed with a beauty of fascinating
awfulness, and with still another beauty that underlies the magnitude
and sits serene amid the grandeur, the inadequate, word-trammeled idea
of it has found endless expression, and yet the scenes of Colorado have
never been described. Whoever has visited her ever after turns aside
from words; whoever has not, can obtain from them but a faint conception
of that which in truth can be imagined only in actual presence--and
hardly even then.
Yet it seems necessary that maps should be drawn, and details written
out, and the camera be called upon to reproduce the stupendous
microscopic detail, and that magnificence should find a biographer and
be put into figures that in the presence of the reality are almost
meaningless. For it is a work-a-day world. The questions of time,
distance, convenience, cost, possibility, cannot be barred from their
foreordained connection in the human mind with even the magnificence
that was builded by the æons; the beauty whose mother was cosmos.
Imagine, to begin with, the extent of this piece of scenery. Colorado
contains 104,500 square miles--66,880,000 acres. Of this vast area--as
big as all New England with Illinois added--two-thirds is mountains. Not
such as claim that name in Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia and the
Carolinas, but Titanic. The height of the average Alleghanies and of the
Blue Ridge is perhaps 2,500 feet. The famed peaks of the chain may rise
sometimes to 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 are from 1,000 to 2,800 feet high. Mount Agamenticus is a hill
that claims 670 feet. Kearsarge, historic name, has only 3,250 feet. The
Peaks of Otter, in Virginia, climb to 4,200 feet.
They might all be lost in this Colorado and never be found again. The
state is traversed by the main chain of the Rockies, the oft-quoted
"backbone of the continent," the huge rooftree of our republic, prolific
mother of rivers, this great watershed gives rise to the Rio Grande, the
two Plattes, the Arkansas, the rivers of central Kansas, the Colorado
that in Arizona passes for two hundred miles between those sheer red
walls that are the scenic wonder of the world, and flows at last into
foreign seas.
Out of this mighty chain and its flanks rise the peaks beside which most
of the serenest heights of 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 of others whose heights
range from 11,000 to 15,000 feet. To him who sees them first from afar,
perhaps across eighty miles of plains-country, where the sudden rising
against the sunset of the Rampart range seems impossible--to him afar
these seem not mountains, but clouds. Thenceforth he is required to
modify his views of elevation and to extend vaguely and indefinitely his
notions of the picturesque. For these giants also he may come to know as
familiar things. The flowers he may gather here also, and may place his
hand within the clefts of those red cathedral towers that were not
reared with hands. Here, too, has the human conquered, and up these vast
defiles the railways climb. Puny they seem amid their strange
environment, yet of the vast wonder they are become a part. Were there
nothing else to appal or please, these alone would repay the journey
from afar, for they illustrate once for all the unabashed capacities of
that which amid nature's wonders, and everywhere is the wonder above
all--the mighty human mind.
[Illustration: The Colorado Capital--In Sixteenth Street, Denver.]
It is a strange country. The very name is a memento of the passing race
that, first of Europeans, saw these serene pinnacles leaning against the
blue. The name means red, light-brown, ruddy, florid, and may even be a
synonym for joyousness. _A Dios con la Colorada_--go thou merrily with
God--is a phrase one may hear in Seville when lovers part. Why red?
Because the dizzy walls that fence the cataract are in Colorado oftenest
of the rich, dull red-brown that even human architecture chooses for its
stateliest spires. One may imagine the Spaniard who clanked his broken
armor in the Cañon of the Arkansas for the first time, and looked
stiffly up at those ruddy walls, and remembered ever afterward, as most
men do, what he saw in the land that is red.
Sublimity and beauty are not usually convertible terms. They do not mean
the same. Grandeur is austere. Yet here one finds the most singular
combinations of these two incompatibilities. The grandeur is over all;
the overpowering sentiment of the vast domain. Yet in all her nooks and
corners nestles the other--beauty beyond compare. When one looks for the
first time upon the Rampart range, fencing the western rim of that vast
undulating plain like a wall, it is impossible for him to imagine
Manitou and Ute Pass and Cheyenne Cañon and the road to the Garden of
the Gods, nestling there so near at hand beneath the cold dome of Pike's
Peak. When one is at Cañon City, a pretty town sleeping among its
orchards in the sunshine, he does not think how soon his train will
glide between the mighty jaws of the Arkansas Cañon. When one traverses
drowsily the mesa lands, smooth and wide and given over to bees and
gardens that lie west of Denver, he cannot by himself foresee the Clear
Creek Cañon just ahead, or imagine the six parallel tracks and the
windings and contortions that make the "loop" at its farther end above
Silver Plume. And at Salida, at five o'clock in the morning, when the
mountain world is filled with the turquoise blue--earth and air and sky,
not merely tinted, but full of the strange solid color that heralds the
mountain dawn--he cannot imagine the rare, sweet, thin air of the
heights of the Marshall Pass that is just ahead, or imagine the rocky
bosom of Ouray, bare, solemn, silent, changeless, serene in the vastness
of the upper air, yet so near that one may almost count the stones that
strew that gray summit where human toil and pain have never been.
[Illustration: Minnehaha Falls--Roadside cascade on the line of the
Cog Railroad up Pike's Peak.]
So it is that beauty and grandeur have never been so nearly akin
elsewhere as they are in Colorado. Of nooks and corners and little
valleys and waterfalls grotesque shapes there are almost thousands. One
may sit at a car window all day, not knowing precisely where he is, or
caring, and catch them as they pass and come and go, until his soul is
tired. Yet it is all on a scale of inconceivable immensity. Even the
mesas and tablelands, where the grass grows as on a lowland farm, are
4,000 to 6,000 feet above the sea--more than twice as high as Mount
Everett. There is nothing low. One cannot get down to the plane of all
his life hitherto. The word "valley" is a relative expression; low and
high have not their usual significance. Looking back as the train crawls
up a mountain side in long doubling curves, one is surprised to see
floating far below him a long and trailing film of silver lace;
something so near and ethereal and beautiful that he cannot recognize it
as that which he has looked up to all his life--a cloud. And on one side
the valley sinks away, narrowing and lowering in distance that seems
infinite. One was down there half an hour ago--down in those narrow
depths, and they seemed high. But from the opposite window, whither one
transfers himself to see the very roof of the world, sure that he has
attained to such a height, as he looks out it is still up, up, up the
slanting, narrow track, the world of mountains below, above, everywhere.
Were he now far below he might look up and see this train as it actually
is; see it as one sees the small brown worm crawling slowly in a
slanting line high up on the face of the rugged, lichen-covered rock.
And if one will have it so, that is all there is to do in this world of
mountains--sit still and be carried amid heights and pines and clouds,
in a new air and an upper world that, save in respect of this railroad,
has nothing in it of human things.
Will the reader kindly glance at the map and note this spiderish network
of railways? When was it that the American engineer first discovered
that his art was precisely the opposite of what it had been imagined to
be--traditional--and that it was meant to make a locomotive climb where
no sane and humane man would think of pushing the reluctant donkey, and
amid heights and vastnesses where even the eagle was once, too,
solitary? Before anyone knew it, except the capitalists, the idea had
been absorbed by these unique brains, and the work was done. The result
is one of the most singular that can be added to ordinary human
experiences. Most travelers take it all for granted; it is there, and it
works, and that is all. Utterly unknown to fame, the men who did these
things have finished them and have gone away, but to them, nevertheless,
is due, not one little railway line led on tall steel trestles across a
few difficult places, but the most remarkable railway system of the
world.
Queer experiences--small ones--occur at frequent intervals in the course
of this elevated and tortuous tour. As one passes by he may see a cleft
between the tawny walls that seems to him as narrow as a door--a gateway
into a mass of peaks that appear to lie jumbled and unbroken and
inaccessible for an unknown distance. But here as he looks back he may
see dimly shining in the half light the two steel rails of another road;
a branch, perhaps, but nevertheless leading somewhere into the heart of
this unknown world, and occupying all the space between the opening
walls with their narrow-gauge utilities. And then one wants to return to
that place sometime, and take that disappearing line, and be trundled
into this new kingdom to see what he may find there.
[Illustration: Map of Marshall Pass.]
GUNNISON CITY
SARGENT
MARSHALL PASS
PONCHA
SALIDA
SARGENT
TO SALT LAKE
BUXTON
CHESTER
SHAWANO
MARSHALL PASS
GRAY'S
TO DENVER
PONCHA
MEARS
SHIRLEY
TO VILLA GROVE
PONCHA PASS
Your train may stop at some little station like Mears, beyond Salida.
Already you may have seen creeping up the mountain ahead of your train
another like it. And here at Mears, looking out and upward from your
window you again see this little train, this time directly above you two
or three hundred feet, on another track, and snakily gliding away
through a narrow gateway into the south. Reference to a map teaches you
that this was not a happening, and that this narrow gateway, as unreal
as a stage scene to the eye, and having a similar effect, is the opening
of an extensive system covering Southern Colorado and extending into New
Mexico.
Scores of times you see, away above or far below, another track. You may
see only a section of it, cut off by rocks at each end, and manifestly
having nothing to do with you and your travels. Then a person suggests
that we were at that place half an hour ago, and asks if you think we
have any connection with still another track, glimpses of which may be
caught on the side of a mountain directly across, with a yawning chasm
between that would make a crow dizzy if he looked down. And after awhile
one is there also, looking across to where he once was, and in his heart
not believing it.
All over this majestic mountain world, without a moment of weariness or
hunger, without cold or heat or loss of rest, seeing all and realizing
little; this is the material and artificial wonder of Colorado travel.
Mingled with these general sensations are the special wonders--the
places and scenes that have been described in thousands of pages. In the
case of most of them it was never of much avail to try to put them into
words; with them all the camera reproduces in miniature scientifically
exact, but failing utterly to convey any other meaning than that of
prettiness, and there is not anything in Colorado that is merely pretty.
When one says that the mountain torrent foams and tumbles among the
rocks beside the track in the cañon for eight or ten miles, it is
useless to say more. Then this camera comes; a wonderful and
indispensable machine, it is true; and makes the white waterfall as big
as one's thumb nail--a foamy spot in a suggested colossal setting--and
that is all. The restlessness, the tinkle, the indescribable sound of
breaking foam, the overhanging shadow, the glimpse of the far blue sky
above and far beyond, the sense that this is nature, careless utterly of
you and all your tribe--all these things are left out. To be amid these
scenes is to live in a new way during the fleeting time that one is
there, and going away again it is to remember more vividly after ten or
twenty years than you did the day after you saw them first.
Scores of places are not in the guidebooks at all that strike the casual
stranger as vividly as anything that is. Every man's Colorado is his
own. Descriptions weary him. In them the words, however well chosen,
illustrate only the orotund and the declamatory, not the thing
described. All the guidebooks need much to be done again, and there does
not live the man who can effectively rewrite them. Presence is required;
presence undeterred by all that is merely written, here or elsewhere.
It might be not unprofitably remembered that much of the pleasure lies
in the unmentioned things that lie between. One need not pass all the
fourteen miles of the Black Cañon looking for the single towering red
shaft that is called the Currecanti Needle. He need not wait and watch
for Chipeta Falls--a little snow-born rivulet that commits ten thousand
suicides in its tumble down the cliffs to die at last in the little
tumbling river that never notices, and goes on forever. He need not shut
his eyes because the guidebook gives him the impression that just ahead
somewhere stands that special wonder that he is almost sure he came so
far particularly to see. The entire endless, solemn, silent, chaotic
mass that fills the view for days has all its entirely undescribable
charm.
And amid it all live the plodding sons of men. Each little mountain nook
where there is water has its occupant. Often there are ranch houses, and
cattle and haystacks. Little mountain towns cling to the bench here and
there. These things seem strange to us, but how must the wide Nebraska
cornfield seem to the man who was born and reared amid scenes like
these?
A man said he did not want any of that land; he thought it might pay,
but he was not willing to undertake a Colorado farm with any hope of
success. Would not a man, he inquired, go out in the morning with the
best intentions, but with almost the certainty that he would sit down on
the plow-beam and look at these mountains almost all day? And he was
morally sure, besides, that he could never wait until Saturday, as they
did in Michigan, to go a-fishing. Look at the river, he said, can a man
stay away from that to farm?
[Illustration: A Nook in Estes Park.
James' Ranch.]
These are but glimpses. They fail, too, just as the guidebooks do, and
there is a vivid glimpse of but one fact--that a man can see and know,
and yet utterly fail to convey to any other human his conception of
anything beyond the merest commonplaces of a country that sends no
messages, writes no embellished chapters, and talks to her visitors only
as the sibyl did--personally and mysteriously or not at all.