The Rocky Mountain foothills astonished her with unspeakable color and landscape

Evidence

Page 76 which, towards its mouth, is a narrow, fertile, wooded valley, through which a bright rapid river, which we forded many times, hurries along, with twists and windings innumerable. Ah, how brightly its ripples danced in the glittering sunshine, and how musically its waters murmured like the streams of windward Hawaii! We lost our way over and over again, though the “innocent” young men had been there before; indeed, it would require some talent to master the intricacies of that devious trail, but settlers making hay always appeared in the nick of time to put us on the right track. Very fair it was, after the brown and burning plains, and the variety was endless. Cotton-wood trees were green and bright, aspens shivered in gold tremulousness, wild grape-vines trailed their lemon-colored foliage along the ground, and the Virginia creeper hung its crimson sprays here and there, lightening up green and gold into glory. … Sometimes from under the cool and bowery shade of the colored tangle we passed into the cool St. Vrain, and then were wedged between its margin and lofty cliffs and terraces of incredibly staring, fantastic rocks, lined, patched, and splashed with carmine, vermilion, greens of all tints, blue, yellow, orange, violet, deep crimson, coloring that no artist would dare to represent, and of which, in sober prose, I scarcely dare tell. Long’s wonderful peaks, which hitherto had gleamed above the green, now disappeared, to be seen no more for twenty miles. We entered on an ascending valley, where the gorgeous hues of the rocks were intensified by the blue gloom of the pitch pines, and then taking a track to the north-west, we left the softer world behind, and all traces of man and his works, and plunged into the Rocky Mountains. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 96

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could use her inability to describe the canyon’s ‘coloring that no artist would dare to represent’ as a window into how 19th-century women travelers rendered sublime landscape when words failed.
• XREF: The vivid turning-color catalogue and terror-of-indescribability echoes Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains and later Thoreau and Muir passages about color saturated landscape. — connects to: Mountain dawns transform the landscape into transcendent beauty that defies words — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 111; High-altitude Sierra sunsets produced an overwhelming emotional spectacle that slowed her passage — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 39; The Rocky Mountain sunrise moved even a hardened desperado to reverence. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 239

Broader Connections

• Mountain dawns transform the landscape into transcendent beauty that defies words #corroborates (0.82) — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 111
• The Rocky Mountain sunrise moved even a hardened desperado to reverence. #expands (0.75) — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 239
• High-altitude Sierra sunsets produced an overwhelming emotional spectacle that slowed her passage #expands (0.74) — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 39