PIKE'S PEAK, TOLL ROAD
Our Land and Country1892A.W. Mills & John
Cowan
America's Wonderlands1893J.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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