States, with the same rich purple trunk and widespreading branches.  Many of them had been girdled by the Indians to obtain the sweet inner bark, which is a favorite luxury of the Utes.  We see very few birds in these mountains, which are too wild for the warblers and insect-eating birds.  We met with the mountain-grouse, a bird of about the size and color of Tetrao cupido, and one or two hawks.  We also saw in the bushes at the roadside the mountain-rabbit (Lepus artemisia), which from its large size we at first mistook for a fawn.  From Heffron’s we continue to ascend for six miles, till just beyond a small lake we got the first view of the Park:  it lay before us like a vast basin, some hundreds of feet below, surrounded with a rim of high mountains.

The Park itself is 9842 feet above the sea-level, or half as high again as Mount Washington.  The surrounding rim is some two thousand feet higher, while in the distance, north, south and west, may be seen the snowy summits, fourteen thousand feet high, of Gray’s Peak, Pike’s Peak, Mount Lincoln, and

  Other Titans, without muse or name.

The South Park is sixty miles long and thirty wide, with a surface like a rolling prairie, and contains hills, groves, lakes and streams in beautiful variety.  It formerly abounded with buffalo and other game, and was a favorite winter hunting-ground of the Indians and the white trappers, but since the great influx of miners the buffaloes have mostly disappeared.  Such, however, is the excellence of the pasture that great herds of cattle are driven up here to feed during the summer.  Several towns and villages have sprung up around the mines in this vicinity, such as Hamilton, Fairplay and Tarryall, to which a stage-coach runs three times a week from Denver.

In our old atlases, forty years ago, we used to see the Rocky Mountains laid down as a great central chain or back-bone of the continent; but they are rather a congeries of groups scattered over an area of six hundred miles in width and a thousand miles long:  among them are hundreds of these parks, from a few acres in extent to the size of the State of Massachusetts.  These mountains differ so entirely from those usually visited and described by travelers, the Alps, the Scottish Highlands and the White Mountains, that one can scarcely believe that this warm air and rich vegetation exist ten thousand feet above the sea.  In climate the Colorado mountains approach more nearly to the Andes, where the snow-line varies from fourteen thousand to seventeen thousand feet.  Here snow begins at twelve thousand feet, and increases in quantity to the extreme height of the tallest peaks, about fourteen thousand two hundred and fifty feet, though even these are often bare in August.  In these parks the cattle live without shelter in winter, and the timber is large and plentiful at eleven thousand feet elevation.  Glaciers are wanting, but instead we have the rich vegetation, the wide range of mountains, the pure, dry and balmy atmosphere, and a variety, a depth and a softness of color which can hardly be equaled on earth.