rs nicknamed by the hunters or trappers who have made
them their temporary resorts. They always lie far within the flaming
Foot Hills, their exquisite stretches of flowery pastures dotted
artistically with clumps of trees sloping lawnlike to bright swift
streams full of red-waist-coated trout, or running up in soft glades
into the dark forest, above which the snow peaks rise in their infinite
majesty. Some are bits of meadow a mile long and very narrow, with a
small stream, a beaver dam, and a pond made by beaver industry.
Hundreds of these can only be reached by riding in the bed of a stream,
or by scrambling up some narrow canyon till it debouches on the
fairy-like stretch above. These parks are the feeding grounds of
innumerable wild animals, and some, like one three miles off, seem
chosen for the process of antler-casting, the grass being covered for
at least a square mile with the magnificent branching horns of the elk.

[15] Nor should I at this time, had not Henry Kingsley, Lord Dunraven,
and "The Field," divulged the charms and whereabouts of these "happy
hunting grounds," with the certain result of directing a stream of
tourists into the solitary, beast-haunted paradise.

Estes Park combines the beauties of all. Dismiss all thoughts of the
Midland Counties. For park palings there are mountains, forest
skirted, 9,000, 11,000, 14,000 feet high; for a lodge, two sentinel
peaks of granite guarding the only feasible entrance; and for a Queen
Anne mansion an unchinked log cabin with a vault of sunny blue
overhead. The park is most irregularly shaped, and contains hardly any
level grass. It is an aggregate of lawns, slopes, and glades, about
eighteen miles in length, but never more than two miles in width. The
Big Thompson, a bright, rapid trout stream, snow born on Long's Peak a
few miles higher, takes all sorts of magical twists, vanishing and
reappearing unexpectedly, glancing among lawns, rushing through
romantic ravines, everywhere making music through the still, long
nights. Here and there the lawns are so smooth, the trees so
artistically grouped, a lake makes such an artistic foreground, or a
waterfall comes tumbling down with such an apparent feeling for the
picturesque, that I am almost angry with Nature for her close imitation
of art. But in another hundred yards Nature, glorious, unapproachable,
inimitable, is herself again, raising one's thoughts reverently upwards
to her Creator and ours. G