Being so admirably located, Denver is a centre for excursions into one of the most attractive mountain regions in America. The great Colorado Front Range, or eastern ridge of the Rockies, stretches grandly across the country and has behind it one range after another, extending far westward to the Utah Basin. Towering behind the Front Range is the Saguache Range, the chief ridge of the Rockies, which makes the Continental Divide. Among these complicated Rocky Mountain ranges are various extensive Parks or broad valleys, nestling amid the peaks and ridges, which were originally the beds of inland lakes. Out of this mountain region flow scores of rivers in all directions, the affluents of the Mississippi to the east, the Rio Grande to the south, and the Colorado and the Columbia westward. All of them have carved down deep and magnificent gorges, two to five thousand feet deep, and in places the wonderful results of ages of erosion are displayed in the peculiar constructions of vast regions, and in special sections, where the carvings by water, frost and wind-forces have made weird and fantastic formations in the rocks on a colossal scale, as in the "Garden of the Gods." These mountains and gorges are also filled with untold wealth, and the mines, producing many millions of gold and silver, have attracted the population chiefly since the Civil War, so that the whole district around and beyond Denver is a region of mining towns, which are reached by a network of railways disclosing the grandest scenery, and in many parts the most startling and daring methods of railroad construction. Whenever land can be reclaimed for agriculture or grazing on the flanks of the mountains and in the protected valleys and parks, it is done, so that the district has extensive irrigation canals, in some parts diverting practically all the available flow of water in the streams. This is particularly the case with the Upper Arkansas River, such diversion of the headwaters in Colorado having robbed the river of its water to such a degree that the people of Kansas, whither it flows on its route to the Mississippi, are greatly annoyed and have protracted litigation about it. COLORADO ATTRACTIONS.