Colorado Outings
9781465629579
108 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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.
