The Most Important Are North
Park, Held By Hostile Indians; Middle Park, Famous For Hot
Springs And Trout; South Park Is 10,000 Feet High, A Great
Rolling Prairie Seventy Miles Long, Well Grassed And Watered, But
Nearly Closed By Snow In Winter.
But parks innumerable are
scattered throughout the mountains, most of them unnamed, and
others nicknamed by the hunters or trappers who have made them
their temporary resorts.
They always lie far within the flaming
Foot Hills, their exquisite stretches of flowery pastures dotted
artistically with clumps of trees sloping lawnlike to bright
swift streams full of red-waist-coated trout, or running up in
soft glades into the dark forest, above which the snow peaks rise
in their infinite majesty. Some are bits of meadow a mile long
and very narrow, with a small stream, a beaver dam, and a pond
made by beaver industry. Hundreds of these can only be reached
by riding in the bed of a stream, or by scrambling up some narrow
canyon till it debouches on the fairy-like stretch above. These
parks are the feeding grounds of innumerable wild animals, and
some, like one three miles off, seem chosen for the process of
antler-casting, the grass being covered for at least a square
mile with the magnificent branching horns of the elk.
[15] Nor should I at this time, had not Henry Kingsley, Lord
Dunraven, and "The Field," divulged the charms and whereabouts of
these "happy hunting grounds," with the certain result of
directing a stream of tourists into the solitary, beast-haunted
paradise.
Estes Park combines the beauties of all. Dismiss all thoughts of
the Midland Counties. For park palings there are mountains,
forest skirted, 9,000, 11,000, 14,000 feet high; for a lodge, two
sentinel peaks of granite guarding the only feasible entrance;
and for a Queen Anne mansion an unchinked log cabin with a vault
of sunny blue overhead. The park is most irregularly shaped, and
contains hardly any level grass. It is an aggregate of lawns,
slopes, and glades, about eighteen miles in length, but never
more than two miles in width. The Big Thompson, a bright, rapid
trout stream, snow born on Long's Peak a few miles higher, takes
all sorts of magical twists, vanishing and reappearing
unexpectedly, glancing among lawns, rushing through romantic
ravines, everywhere making music through the still, long nights.
Here and there the lawns are so smooth, the trees so artistically
grouped, a lake makes such an artistic foreground, or a waterfall
comes tumbling down with such an apparent feeling for the
picturesque, that I am almost angry with Nature for her close
imitation of art. But in another hundred yards Nature, glorious,
unapproachable, inimitable, is herself again, raising one's
thoughts reverently upwards to her Creator and ours. Grandeur
and sublimity, not softness, are the features of Estes Park. The
glades which begin so softly are soon lost in the dark primaeval
forests, with their peaks of rosy granite, and their stretches of
granite blocks piled and poised by nature in some mood of fury.
The streams are lost in canyons nearly or quite inaccessible,
awful in their blackness and darkness; every valley ends in
mystery; seven mountain ranges raise their frowning barriers
between us and the Plains, and at the south end of the park
Long's Peak rises to a height of 14,700 feet, with his bare,
scathed head slashed with eternal snow. The lowest part of the
Park is 7,500 feet high; and though the sun is hot during the
day, the mercury hovers near the freezing point every night of
the summer. An immense quantity of snow falls, but partly owing
to the tremendous winds which drift it into the deep valleys,
and partly to the bright warm sun of the winter months, the park
is never snowed up, and a number of cattle and horses are
wintered out of doors on its sun-cured saccharine grasses, of
which the gramma grass is the most valuable.
The soil here, as elsewhere in the neighborhood, is nearly
everywhere coarse, grey, granitic dust, produced probably by the
disintegration of the surrounding mountains. It does not hold
water, and is never wet in any weather. There are no thaws here
The snow mysteriously disappears by rapid evaporation. Oats
grow, but do not ripen, and, when well advanced, are cut and
stacked for winter fodder. Potatoes yield abundantly, and,
though not very large, are of the best quality, mealy throughout.
Evans has not attempted anything else, and probably the more
succulent vegetables would require irrigation. The wild flowers
are gorgeous and innumerable, though their beauty, which
culminates in July and August, was over before I arrived, and the
recent snow flurries have finished them. The time between winter
and winter is very short, and the flowery growth and blossom of a
whole year are compressed into two months. Here are dandelions,
buttercups, larkspurs, harebells, violets, roses, blue gentian,
columbine, painter's brush, and fifty others, blue and yellow
predominating; and though their blossoms are stiffened by the
cold every morning, they are starring the grass and drooping over
the brook long before noon, making the most of their brief lives
in the sunshine. Of ferns, after many a long hunt, I have only
found the Cystopteris fragilis and the Blechnum spicant, but
I hear that the Pteris aquilina is also found. Snakes and
mosquitoes do not appear to be known here. Coming almost direct
from the tropics, one is dissatisfied with the uniformity of the
foliage; indeed, foliage can hardly be written of, as the trees
properly so called at this height are exclusively Coniferae, and
bear needles instead of leaves. In places there are patches of
spindly aspens, which have turned a lemon yellow, and along the
streams bear cherries, vines, and roses lighten the gulches with
their variegated crimson leaves. The pines are not imposing,
either from their girth or height. Their coloring is blackish
green, and though they are effective singly or in groups, they
are somber and almost funereal when densely massed, as here,
along the mountain sides.
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