The Timber Line Is At A Height Of
About 11,000 Feet, And Is Singularly Well Defined.
The most
attractive tree I have seen is the silver spruce, Abies
Englemanii, near of kin to what is often called the balsam fir.
Its shape and color are both beautiful. My heart warms towards
it, and I frequent all the places where I can find it. It looks
as if a soft, blue, silver powder had fallen on its deep-green
needles, or as if a bluish hoar-frost, which must melt at noon,
were resting upon it. Anyhow, one can hardly believe that the
beauty is permanent, and survives the summer heat and the winter
cold. The universal tree here is the Pinus ponderosa, but it
never attains any very considerable size, and there is nothing to
compare with the red-woods of the Sierra Nevada, far less with
the sequoias of California.
As I have written before, Estes Park is thirty miles from
Longmount, the nearest settlement, and it can be reached on
horseback only by the steep and devious track by which I came,
passing through a narrow rift in the top of a precipitous ridge,
9,000 feet high, called the Devil's Gate. Evans takes a lumber
wagon with four horses over the mountains, and a Colorado
engineer would have no difficulty in making a wagon road. In
several of the gulches over which the track hangs there are the
remains of wagons which have come to grief in the attempt to
emulate Evans's feat, which without evidence, I should have
supposed to be impossible.
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