: Colorado Outings by Steele James W James William - Colorado Description and travel

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Colorado Outings

BY JAMES STEELE.

ISSUED BY THE PASSENGER DEPARTMENT BURLINGTON ROUTE, CHICAGO.

Colorado Outings.

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 aeons; 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.

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 Ca?on 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 Ca?on 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 Ca?on. 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 Ca?on 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.

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.

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