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Show 464 WESTERN WILDS. ficjial lakes, all stocked with trout. All the irrigating canals, taken out as far as possible up the mountain streams, are carried high up on the ridges, and into every convenient depression an acecquia leads sufficient water to maintain a crystal lake. This insures, in a few years, an abundant supply of fish ; and local scientists affirm that the increase of water surface will eventually give this section more rain-fall, and redeem much of the high land for agriculture. Bowlder has a romantic location. Just above the town, westward, the mountain rises very abruptly nearly two thousand feet, its front split by the nar-row Bowlder Canon, from whose rugged jaws gushes the clear and crystal stream. Once issued from the mountain, the foaming creek subsides to a gentle current, meandering through a fertile valley. Some distance up the canon a flume is put in, to gain a fall, and thence the water is carried along the cliff in trestled boxes; issuing thence far up on the ridge, it circles all the valley, supplying irri-gation to thirty thousand acres of land, with abundant surplus for fish- ponds and fountains. Bowlder Valley now yields from a fourth to a third of all the wheat produced in Colorado. But if you would enjoy Western Wilds in all their native beauty, take the stage from Bowlder up to Caribou, at the head of the canon all the way through pine- clad hills, romantic glens or wild gorges, which excite every emotion of awe and sublimity. To the right of the road, shut in by walls of water- worn granite and shaded by dense forests of overhanging pines, are the Bowlder Falls a mighty work of nature, which will long remain unmarred by the hand of man, for rocky flume, granite wall and pine- clad summit have transcendent beauty without utility. The stream, which rises almost on the summit, issu-ing from the snow- banks which send out ice- cold rills from May till October, plunges down a series of offsets, each making a majestic cas-cade, each cascade differing from all the rest. From the foot of each little fall a winding way leads along the mossy hill- sides to the next above ; while the whole way is shaded by the immense pines, which in places lean over and mingle their branches above the foamy rapids. Here a well- equipped excursion party might spend days of calm en-joyment, shaded by the evergreen forests, lulled by the roar of the waters, soothing eye and brain by contemplation of nature's wild beauty. After a day's slow progress upward, our coach suddenly emerges into the open mountain meadows about Nederland ( location of the Holland Company's quartz mills), and a few miles beyond darkness comes upon us at Caribou, a mining town almost on the summit of |