subject: The Black Canyon Of The Gunnison [print this page] Romance has clustered about the summits of the Colorado Rockies. Don Pedro de Villasur first led the steel-clad conquistadores into the "red land" over Raton. General John C. Fremont, the Pathfinder, met his tragic winter disaster on Cochetopa, Pass of the Buffaloes. The first steel rails to cross the high Colorado Rockies still shine on Marshall Pass. And over most of these passes went the fur trader and the gold seeker. They lead to the old mining towns of Leadville and Cripple Creek, nestled intimately between their great ore dumps that resemble monstrous anthills. They point the motorist to the once-roaring camps of Creede and Aspen, Silverton and Ouray; they entice him into the by-ways where quaint, forgotten ghost towns tell their stories of frontier hardships and Aladdin's wonderful lamp. There are innumerable dalliances for the motorist. I think offhand of the Serpentine Trail to the red sandstone monoliths of Colorado National Monument; of Grand Mesa with its hundred lakes on the summit; of the Great Sand Dunes, with their shifting sands and disappearing river; of the prehistoric cliff-dwellings of Mesa Verde, set like cameos in their cliff caves; of the hot mineral springs at Glenwood, Pagosa, Steamboat, Sulphur Springs and a score of other places where one may splash about in a bathing suit with the thermometer registering thirty below, if he is so minded. There are two hundred and fifty of these mineral springs in Colorado. I think, too, of the one and only Horse Thief Trail at Ouray, for those who like a day's horseback trip that will live in memory until death. I think of Hanging Lake, which built its own basin-like a swallow's nest-against the cliff wall of Glenwood Canyon. I think of the Royal Gorge with its spider-web suspension bridge more than a thousand feet above the riverbed; of the new motor route to the rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. One could take three Washington monuments, pile them one upon the other in this great, sombre gorge and the tip would still lack several hundred feet of reaching the rim. A slender ribbon of green and silver marks the Gunnison River. Far down the sun-filled gulf thousands of white-throated swifts float hither and yon like tiny motes dancing in a beam of light. One-third of a mile deep, a few city blocks wide at the top, forty-six feet wide at the bottom. That is the Black Canyon. Of all the outdoor sports in Colorado, save motoring, trout fishing intrigues the greatest number. In the large irrigation reservoirs that dot the eastern plains the newcomer will be at home with his bass and perch, his crappie and cat. But in Colorado fishing means trout fishing, unless it is otherwise specifically indicated. This, of course, is what one would call a habit-forming sport.
