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PIKE'S PEAK, TOLL ROAD

Our Land and Country
—1892—A.W. Mills & John Cowan
America's Wonderlands—1893—J.W. Buel

The many thousands of square miles of almost every kind of Nature's formations, and on the vastest scale, visible from this elevation, is inexpressibly grand, romantic, dazing; and mingling its marvellous attractions with other wonders is the ever-grateful and fascinating Cascade, with which all are familiar by eye or description. The toll road commences in the Cascade locality, and is fourteen feet wide, with an easy grade, and the length is some sixteen miles. It is stated to be the loftiest carriage-drive in the world, and, with the progress of ascent, the road winds around the side of the mountain, overlooking town and valley, a fine view being gained of Cascade, the mesas and the valley of the Fontaine, afterward entering the head of the Cascade Canyon. Eight miles from Cascade the road passes near to the Devil's Leap, a precipice of twenty-five hundred feet, and when twelve miles up the road passes on to the Hayden Divide, and there, on a mountain spur from Pike's Peak, is Grand View: great plains stretching far out to the cast the Colorado Springs, at the foot of the mountains, eight thousand feet below; Denver, seventy-five miles to the north; and Pueblo, fifty miles to the south, a more wonderful display of natural magnificence was never dreamed. Pike's Peak cog wheel railway is, as it were, a challenge from Art to Nature, in wonder-working. The United States weather station, too, at the summit, is a spot of peculiar interest, from its unequalled altitude and the character of its meteorological observations. The name given to this lofty elevation of some fourteen thousand feet was in honor of General Zebulon M. Pike, a United States military officer, by whom it was discovered in 1806.



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