A mining boomtown was crammed into a gorge reachable only by canyon road

Evidence

The road pursued the canyon to Idaho Springs, a fashionable mountain resort in the summer, but deserted now, where we took a superb team of six horses, with which we attained a height of 10,000 feet, and then a descent of 1,000 took us into Georgetown, crowded into as remarkable a gorge as was ever selected for the site of a town, the canyon beyond apparently terminating in precipitous and inaccessible mountains, sprinkled with pines up to the timber line, and thinly covered with snow. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels her earlier descriptions of Western towns wedged into terrain, and connects to the tree-line and high-altitude landscape notes elsewhere in the book.