Colorado’s foothill roads combined vertiginous danger with stark scenic contrasts.

Evidence

It was a short eighteen miles’ ride to Denver down the Turkey Creek Canyon, which contains some magnificent scenery, and then the road ascends and hangs on the ledge of a precipice 600 feet in depth, such a narrow road that on meeting a wagon I had to dismount for fear of hurting my feet with the wheels. From thence there was a wonderful view through the rolling Foot Hills and over the gray-brown plains to Denver. Not a tree or shrub was to be seen, everything was rioting in summer heat and drought, while behind lay the last grand canyon of the mountains, dark with pines and cool with snow. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 202

Categorization

• XREF: The parched, treeless plain against pine-dark canyon echoes the tree-as-infrastructure material on how landscape marks and divides.
• SEED: Angle: 1870s Colorado as a place where drought, heat, and snow could coexist within sight of one another.