Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/154

 and the winter cold. The universal tree here is the Pinus ponderosa, but it never attains any very considerable size, and there is nothing to compare with the red-woods of the Sierra Nevada, far less with the sequoias of California.

As I have written before, Estes Park is thirty miles from Longmount, the nearest settlement, and it can be reached on horseback only by the steep and devious track by which I came, passing through a narrow rift in the top of a precipitous ridge, 9000 feet high, called the Devil's Gate. Evans takes a lumber waggon with four horses over the mountains, and a Colorado engineer would have no difficulty in making a waggon road. In several of the gulches over which the track hangs there are the remains of waggons which have come to grief in the attempt to emulate Evans's feat, which, without evidence, I should have supposed to be impossible. It is an awful road. The only settlers in the Park are Griffith Evans, and a married man a mile higher up. "Mountain Jim's" cabin is in the entrance gulch, four miles off, and there is not another cabin for eighteen miles towards the Plains. The Park is unsurveyed, and the huge tract of mountainous country beyond is almost altogether unexplored. Elk-hunters occasionally come up and camp out here; but the two settlers, who, however, are only squatters, for various reasons are not disposed to encourage such visitors. When Evans, who