stopteris fragilis and the Blechnum
spicant, but I hear that the Pteris aquilina is also found. Snakes and
mosquitoes do not appear to be known here. Coming almost direct from
the tropics, one is dissatisfied with the uniformity of the foliage;
indeed, foliage can hardly be written of, as the trees properly so
called at this height are exclusively Coniferae, and bear needles
instead of leaves. In places there are patches of spindly aspens,
which have turned a lemon yellow, and along the streams bear cherries,
vines, and roses lighten the gulches with their variegated crimson
leaves. The pines are not imposing, either from their girth or height.
Their coloring is blackish green, and though they are effective singly
or in groups, they are somber and almost funereal when densely massed,
as here, along the mountain sides. 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. It is an awful road. The only settlers in the park are
Griffith Evans, and a married man a mile higher up. "Mountain Jim's"
cabin is in the entrance gulch, four mi