After watching the operation for an hour or more, we started up across the foot-hills to get to the Laramie road on the other side, passing a stream where the water was as red as blood from the red mud or sand being washed down. These foot-hills are immense ledges of rocks that look very much as I have seen ice packed up against the banks of the Connecticut River when the ice breaks up in the spring. Looking at these foot-hills toward the west, they present the appearance of so many rounded hills of gravel and sand; but go up into and pass through them, and turn about and look at them in the opposite direction, and it seems really as if, ages ago, the crust of the earth had been broken up, as ice is in the spring, and the immense cakes of red and white sandstone had been jammed and forced up against the broad shoulders of the Rocky Mountains, till these slabs of stratified rock, several hundred feet thick, overlapped each other, and some of them were even forced up into almost perpendicular positions. Wherever I have passed through these foot-hills, whether at Manitou, Boulder, or at Fort Collins, the country has the same general appearance: that of some immense rock-jam forcing the cakes from the east up on the banks of the Rocky Mountains. Much of the red sandstone is very red, and the contrast between that and the white sandstone is strongly marked, the red and white hills being mixed up promiscuously. We followed a very good road up through the foot-hills for awhile, but the wagon tracks grew fewer and fewer, as they branched off in different directions, till we struck a common trail, and as we wound around the north side of a high rocky hill this trail disappeared entirely, and we found ourselves off among the barren and sandy foot-hills without the slightest road, trail, or habitation in sight for miles. We debated some time which direction to take, but finally I left my knapsack and wheel and climbed up the rocky side of that hill to get a better view, when behold, there was the Laramie road, just over the hill about a mile away. We had a hard job to get our machines over, but were soon on our way, spinning over a fine mountain road that remained good for fifty miles to Laramie, furnishing some of the finest coasting I ever had. This road for many miles was probably 8,000 feet above the sea, so that this elevation had the effect to dwarf the mountains that rose only a little higher. In fact, it is generally remarked by travelers that the Rocky Mountain scenery west of Cheyenne is very tame. Many of the hills are perfectly level on top, looking at them against the horizon, and the sides slant off, the angles being as sharp and clean cut as if the hills were built by hand.