It is unsurveyed,
"no man's land," and mine by right of love, appropriation, and
appreciation; by the seizure of
Its peerless sunrises and
sunsets, its glorious afterglow, its blazing noons, its
hurricanes sharp and furious, its wild auroras, its glories of
mountain and forest, of canyon, lake, and river, and the
stereotyping them all in my memory. Mine, too, in a better than
the sportsman's sense, are its majestic wapiti, which play and
fight under the pines in the early morning, as securely as fallow
deer under our English oaks; its graceful "black-tails," swift of
foot; its superb bighorns, whose noble leader is to be seen now
and then with his classic head against the blue sky on the top of
a colossal rock; its sneaking mountain lion with his hideous
nocturnal caterwaulings, the great "grizzly," the beautiful
skunk, the wary beaver, who is always making lakes, damming and
turning streams, cutting down young cotton-woods, and setting an
example of thrift and industry; the wolf, greedy and cowardly;
the coyote and the lynx, and all the lesser fry of mink, marten,
cat, hare, fox, squirrel, and chipmunk, as well as things that
fly, from the eagle down to the crested blue-jay. May their
number never be less, in spite of the hunter who kills for food
and gain, and the sportsman who kills and marauds for
pastime!
But still I have not answered the natural question,[15] "What is
Estes Park?" Among the striking peculiarities of these mountains
are hundreds of high-lying valleys, large and small, at heights
varying from 6,000 to 11,000 feet. 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 59 of 144
Words from 30385 to 30926
of 74789
