Monday dawned as bright as Sunday had been, and by eight o’clock I reached Manitou and was ready to begin the ascent of Pike’s Peak. There was a wide choice of route, for there was a road, and a well-beaten trail, and the bed of the cog railway. I took to the railway as the most unmistakable and very likely the directest course.
With infinite engineering skill the first ascent of the cog-road is cut as a ledge along the side of a deep gorge or cañon, down which rushes a mountain stream of considerable volume. Following the great turns of the cañon the road ascends in the shadow of huge rocks, that tower straight above it or slope in a more gradual rise, furnishing place for the cabin of a miner or of some lover of camp life. The mountain-sides are dark with evergreen, which seems to grow deep-rooted in the rock, clinging at times to a bare, protruding ledge with naked roots thrust deep into crevices where soil and moisture are found. The quaking aspen shares this bare subsistence with the pine, and, green with the rich green of late summer at the mountain-base, it marked all the stages of the autumn in the ascent, until at the timber-line I found its leaves turned yellow and fast falling to the ground.
About two miles below Windy Point I had the good luck to overtake a miner, who had been spending Sunday with his family near Colorado Springs and was now on his way back to work in Cripple Creek. He was not at all encouraging as to the prospect of my finding work in the camp, but before we parted at Windy Point he gave me careful directions about the way, and I began to feel, in his calling me “partner” and in his talk of “claims” and “gulches” and “blazed trails,” my first intimation of nearing the mining regions of the Rockies.
We separated where the cog-road sweeps around the southern side of the mountain, only because I was bent on reaching the summit before going on to Cripple Creek. All the difficulty of the ascent I found concentrated in the last hour of climbing. It no longer was a matter of steady uphill work, but a succession of short spurts wherein one breathed more by accident than design. You were not tired in the least, but, at an altitude of some 14,000 feet, your breath failed completely in an upward walk of fifty yards, and you were obliged to stand still, panting until respiration became normal again.