Probably the best known summit of the Rockies is Pike's Peak, rearing its snowy top over Manitou, and about six miles westward from Colorado Springs, to an elevation of nearly fourteen thousand two hundred feet. As it rises almost sheer, in the Colorado Front Range, this noble mountain can be seen from afar across the eastern plains. A cog-wheel railway nine miles long ascends to the summit from Manitou, rising seventy-five hundred feet. There is a small hotel at the top, and a superb view over the mountains and glens and mining camps all around. In 1806 General Zebulon Pike, then a captain in the army, led an exploring expedition to this remote region and discovered this noble mountain, which was given his name. Forests cover the lower slopes, but the top is composed of bare rocks, usually snow-covered. Below it a huge tunnel is being bored through the range to connect Colorado Springs with the Cripple Creek mining district to the westward. Manitou has a group of springs of weak compound carbonated soda, resembling those of Ems, and beneficial to consumptive, dyspeptic and other patients. They are at the entrance of the romantic Ute Pass, a gorge with many attractions, which was formerly the trail of the Ute Indians in crossing the mountains. Nearby, upon the Mesa, or "table-land," is the "Garden of the Gods," a tract of about one square mile, thickly studded with huge grotesque cliffs and rocks of white and red sandstones, their unique carving being the result of the erosive processes that have been going on for ages. They are all given appropriate names, and its Gateway is a passage just wide enough for the road, between two enormous bright red rocks over three hundred feet high. Farther south on the Arkansas River is Pueblo, an industrial city of thirty thousand people in a rich mining district, where there is a Mineral Palace, having a wonderful ceiling formed of twenty-eight domes, into which are worked specimens of all the Colorado minerals. The route then crosses the Veta Pass at ninety-four hundred feet elevation, whereon is the abrupt bend known as the "Mule Shoe Curve," and beyond this it descends into the most extensive of the Colorado Parks, the San Luis, covering six thousand square miles. Sentineling its western side is the triple-peaked Sierra Blanca, the loftiest Colorado Mountain, rising almost fourteen thousand five hundred feet. The Rio Grande flows to the southward, and there is Alamosa, and up in the mountains Creede, an extraordinary development of recent silver mining, which began its career when the ore was discovered in 1891, has seven thousand people, and has produced $4,000,000 silver in a year. [Illustration: _Gateway, Garden of the Gods, Colorado_]