Garden of the Gods

I visited a valley near the base of Pikes Peak known since the mid-19th century as the Garden of the Gods. It is a garden not of flowers, but of rock - of kissing camels and stone toadstools and mammoth sandstone walls tilted upward toward the Colorado sky. Travel-writer Ernest Ingersoll once called this garden "a gigantic peep-show in pantomime." Novelist Helen Hunt thought it "the very climax of some supernatural catastrophe." And all-American hero Charles A. Lindbergh was fully convinced that he had never seen "a more spectacular and magnificent place."

According to a pamphlet I picked up, "Geologists claim that the story of the Garden of the Gods began nearly 300 million years ago, when sediment from the Ancestral Rockies was carried eastward and spread out into great alluvial fans. This sediment was then reddened by ferric iron and long covered by a shallow inland sea. Some sixty million years ago - when the modern Rocky Mountains began their upward thrust - the horizontal sedimentary rocks were elevated and tilted skyward. The forces of wind and rain then gradually stripped away the softer layers, sculptering each rock into the form we see today: Gateway Rocks, Tower of Babel, Balanced Rock, Cathedral Spires, Three Graces, Sleeping Indian, Siamese Twins, Scotsman, Pig's Eye."

I don't know if I buy the 300 million years or even the 60 million years part, but I will say that the Garden of the Gods is a pretty spectacular sight. I went there today after getting out a little early from the workshop and spent a couple of hours driving through the park and looking at these amazing formations.

Standing there, gazing about me, I tried to imagine what it must have been like to see these mountains and rock formations for the first time. What it must have been like to live here, hunt here, pass through here on the way to somewhere else equally unknown. If those great rocks could but speak, what stories they might tell! Stories of native Americans, pioneers, mountain men, gold miners, explores. Of men and women, families and loners. Some with altruistic purposes, others just trying to survive. I ate

supper in a little cafe that had Native American music playing softly. I was transported, in spirit at least, to another time...a time without the stress that fills my every day existence. I couldn't be further from living the lifestyle of any single person I listed above!!! There are days I'd give a lot to live any of those other lives...but...since I can't, it's nice to imagine it now and again!