Colorado’s mountain parks are hundreds of hidden high valleys from 6,000 to 11,000 feet
Evidence
What is Estes Park?” Among the striking peculiarities of these mountains are hundreds of high-lying valleys, large and small, at heights varying from 6,000 to 11,000 feet. The most important are North Park, held by hostile Indians; Middle Park, famous for hot springs and trout; South Park is 10,000 feet high, a great rolling prairie seventy miles long, well grassed and watered, but nearly closed by snow in winter. … But parks innumerable are scattered throughout the mountains, most of them unnamed, and others 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. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 273
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘park’ term being a high mountain valley — not an English landscaped enclosure — reframes what Estes ‘Park’ means, a definition worth keeping against Midland-County assumptions.
Related
- The Colorado Rockies exceed the Alps as a mountain panorama. (similarity 0.81)
- Every mile traveling from Colorado Springs leads farther and higher into the mountains (similarity 0.78)