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.
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