There were wonderful ascents then up which I led my horse; wild
fantastic views opening up continually, a recurrence of surprises; the
air keener and purer with every mile, the sensation of loneliness more
singular. A tremendous ascent among rocks and pines to a height of
9,000 feet brought us to a passage seven feet wide through a wall of
rock, with an abrupt descent of 2,000 feet, and a yet higher ascent
beyond. I never saw anything so strange as looking back. It was a
single gigantic ridge which we had passed through, standing up
knifelike, built up entirely of great brick-shaped masses of bright red
rock, some of them as large as the Royal Institution, Edinburgh, piled
one on another by Titans. Pitch pines grew out of their crevices, but
there was not a vestige of soil. Beyond, wall beyond wall of similar
construction, and range above range, rose into the blue sky. Fifteen
miles more over great ridges, along passes dark with shadow, and so
narrow that we had to ride in the beds of the streams which had
excavated them, round the bases of colossal pyramids of rock crested
with pines, up into fair upland "parks," scarlet in patches with the
poison oak, parks so beautifully arranged by nature that I momentarily
expected to come upon some stately mansion, but that afternoon crested
blue jays and chipmunks had them all to themselves. Here, in the early
morning, deer, bighorn, and the stately elk, come down to feed, and
there, in the night, prowl and growl the Rocky Mountain lion, the
grizzly bear, and the cowardly wolf. There were chasms of immense
depth, dark with the indigo gloom of pines, and mountains with snow
gleaming on their splintered crests, loveliness to bewilder and
grandeur to awe, and still streams and shady pools, and cool depths of
shadow; mountains again, dense with pines, among which patches of aspen
gleamed like gold; valleys where the yellow cotton-wood mingled with
the crimson oak, and so, on and on through the lengthening shadows,
till the trail, which in places had been hardly legible, became well
defined, and we entered a long gulch with broad swellings of grass
belted with pines.

A very pretty mare, hobbled, was feeding; a collie dog barked at us,
and among the scrub, not far from the track, there was a rude, black
log cabin, as rough as it could be to be a shelter at all, with smoke
coming out of the roof and window. We diverged towards it; it mattered
not that it was the home, or r