e. The road ascended to a height of
11,000 feet, and from thence I looked my last at the lonely, uplifted
prairie sea. "Denver stage road!" The worst, rudest, dismallest,
darkest road I have yet traveled on, nothing but a winding ravine, the
Platte canyon, pine crowded and pine darkened, walled in on both sides
for six miles by pine-skirted mountains 12,000 feet high! Along this
abyss for fifty miles there are said to be only five houses, and were
it not for miners going down, and freight wagons going up, the solitude
would be awful. As it was, I did not see a creature. It was four when
I left South Park, and between those mountain walls and under the pines
it soon became quite dark, a darkness which could be felt. The snow
which had melted in the sun had re-frozen, and was one sheet of smooth
ice. Birdie slipped so alarmingly that I got off and walked, but then
neither of us could keep our feet, and in the darkness she seemed so
likely to fall upon me, that I took out of my pack the man's socks
which had been given me at Perry's Park, and drew them on over her
fore-feet--an expedient which for a time succeeded admirably, and which
I commend to all travelers similarly circumstanced. It was unutterably
dark, and all these operations had to be performed by the sense of
touch only. I remounted, allowed her to take her own way, as I could
not see even her ears, and though her hind legs slipped badly, we
contrived to get along through the narrowest part of the canyon, with a
tumbling river close to the road. The pines were very dense, and
sighed and creaked mournfully in the severe frost, and there were other
EERIE noises not easy to explain. At last, when the socks were nearly
worn out, I saw the blaze of a camp-fire, with two hunters sitting by
it, on the hill side, and at the mouth of a gulch something which
looked like buildings. We got across the river partly on ice and
partly by fording, and I found that this was the place where, in spite
of its somewhat dubious reputation, I had been told that I could put up.

A man came out in the sapient and good-natured stage of intoxication,
and, the door being opened, I was confronted by a rough bar and a
smoking, blazing kerosene lamp without a chimney. This is the worst
place I have put up at as to food, lodging, and general character; an
old and very dirty log cabin, not chinked, with one dingy room used for
cooking and feeding, in which a miner was lying very ill