y after starting turned off into the wilderness
on a very dim trail. Soon seeing a man riding a mile ahead, I rode on
and overtook him, and we rode eight miles together, which was
convenient to me, as without him I should several times have lost the
trail altogether. Then his fine American horse, on which he had only
ridden two days, broke down, while my "mad, bad bronco," on which I had
been traveling for a fortnight, cantered lightly over the snow. He was
the only traveler I saw in a day of nearly twelve hours. I thoroughly
enjoyed every minute of that ride. I concentrated all my faculties of
admiration and of locality, for truly the track was a difficult one. I
sometimes thought it deserved the bad name given to it at Link's. For
the most part it keeps in sight of Tarryall Creek, one of the large
affluents of the Platte, and is walled in on both sides by mountains,
which are sometimes so close together as to leave only the narrowest
canyon between them, at others breaking wide apart, till, after winding
and climbing up and down for twenty-five miles, it lands one on a
barren rock-girdled park, watered by a rapid fordable stream as broad
as the Ouse at Huntingdon, snow fed and ice fringed, the park bordered
by fantastic rocky hills, snow covered and brightened only by a dwarf
growth of the beautiful silver spruce. I have not seen anything
hitherto so thoroughly wild and unlike the rest of these parts.

I rode up one great ascent where hills were tumbled about confusedly;
and suddenly across the broad ravine, rising above the sunny grass and
the deep green pines, rose in glowing and shaded red against the
glittering blue heaven a magnificent and unearthly range of mountains,
as shapely as could be seen, rising into colossal points, cleft by deep
blue ravines, broken up into sharks' teeth, with gigantic knobs and
pinnacles rising from their inaccessible sides, very fair to look
upon--a glowing, heavenly, unforgettable sight, and only four miles
off. Mountains they looked not of this earth, but such as one sees in
dreams alone, the blessed ranges of "the land which is very far off."
They were more brilliant than those incredible colors in which painters
array the fiery hills of Moab and the Desert, and one could not believe
them for ever uninhabited, for on them rose, as in the East, the
similitude of stately fortresses, not the gray castellated towers of
feudal Europe, but gay, massive, Saracenic architecture, t