At
this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me.
Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every
hue of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim
distance, or fade on the horizon. We have now reach'd, penetrated the
Rockies, (Hayden calls it the Front Range,) for a hundred miles or
so; and though these chains spread away in every direction, specially
north and south, thousands and thousands farther, I have seen
specimens of the utmost of them, and know henceforth at least what
they are, and what they look like. Not themselves alone, for they
typify stretches and areas of half the globe--are, in fact, the
vertebrae or back-bone of our hemisphere. As the anatomists say a man
is only a spine, topp'd, footed, breasted and radiated, so the whole
Western world is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains. In
South America they are the Andes, in Central America and Mexico the
Cordilleras, and in our States they go under different names--in
California the Coast and Cascade ranges--thence more eastwardly the
Sierra Nevadas--but mainly and more centrally here the Rocky Mountains
proper, with many an elevation such as Lincoln's, Grey's, Harvard's,
Yale's, Long's and Pike's peaks, all over 14,000 feet high. (East, the
highest peaks of the Alleghanies, the Adirondacks, the Catskills,
and the White Mountains, range from 2000 to 5500 feet-only Mount
Washington, in the latter, 6300 feet.)
THE PARKS
In the midst of all here, lie such beautiful contrasts as the sunken
basins of the North, Middle, and South Parks, (the latter I am now on
one side of, and overlooking,) each the size of a large, level, almost
quandrangular, grassy, western county, wall'd in by walls of hills,
and each park the source of a river.
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