John Otto: Trials and Trails

By Alan J. Kania

Author Kania dedicates his book to the eccentrics of the world. May they never give up their dream. John Otto did not give up. Though he died in poverty in California in an abandoned post office building that he had painted red, white and blue, his spirit lives on at Colorado National Monument, along Rimrock Drive, and along the many trails which provide the solitude he sought. [Reviewed by Andrew Gulliford who teaches environmental history and directs the Public History and Historic Preservation Program at Middle Tennessee State University. During the spring of 1997, he was the Wayne N. Aspinal Visiting Chair of History at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colo.

Dr. Thomas Noel, Doctor Colorado: This is the strangest tale since Alferd Packer, the man eater. After his 1903 release from a California insane asylum, John Otto came to Colorado, apparently to straighten out Gov. James H. Peabody. Peabody was in the process of exterminating the Western Federation of Miners, a union on strike because Colorado employers were failing to observe the eight-hour-a-day law.

Otto was arrested and charged with attempting to assault the governor with the well-sharpened tip of his miners candle stick. After an insanity trail, this rover from Missouri was released as a harmless crank.

Otto then settled in Fruita, Colo., where a few years later he forbade Gov. henry A. Buchtel to make an appearance, threatening to get some dynamite and have a big blowout.

After another arrest, insanity trial and release, Otto lived as a hermit in Monument Canyon, a spectacular set of red sandstone formations on the outskirts of Grand Junction. He supported himself with odd jobs on nearby ranches but devoted most of his time to exploring the pinyon-clad canyons and clifftops, building serpentine foot trails and erecting American flags.

After re-emerging in the local press as an eccentric, flag-waving booster, Otto began a one-man crusade to make Monument Canyon a national park. After attracting local support, Otto proudly attended the creation of Colorado National Monument on May 24, 1911.

The National Park Service appointed Otto custodian of Colorados first national monument at a salary of $1 a month.

In 1927, local Chamber of Commerce boosters and the National Park Service eased Otto out of his job. The 48-year-old father of Colorado National Monument headed for California to resume his life as a hermit.

After living for years in a cave and old shacks, he moved into a vacant post office. There he lived on corn flakes until his death in 1952.

This book resurrects a crank whom, one suspects, Grand Junctionites and the National Park Service would prefer to forget. Author Kania refrains from judging Ottos sanity or his accomplishments. Readers are left to decide for themselves.

Although apparently demented, Otto spoke up for the rights of labor, women and non-conformists.

He championed progressive causes, but other reformers apparently felt uncomfortable with someone operating so close to the edge of sanity and society. Tom Noel reviewed John Otto of Colorado National Monument, by Alan J. Kania. Dr. Noel teaches Colorado History at the University of Colorado at Denver.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Alan J. Kania has been a journalist for over 40 years, writing extensively for newspapers and magazines. He also serves his third term as a member of the board of directors of the Denver Press club, the oldest organization of its kind in the United States. He also serves on the founding board of directors of the American chapter of the International Communications Forum, a London-based mass communications organization. He is co-director and American representative of the Southern Africa Media Alliance. He also has taught journalism disciplines at Denver University and at Metropolitan State College in Denver.

He is the author of John Otto of Colorado Nat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 3, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462826193

Alan J. Kania

Alan J. Kania began his photojournalism career in the early 1960s. His junior-high school gym teacher solicited students to write sports stories for the Beverly (Massachusetts) Evening Times. Since Alan created a school newspaper as a fourth grader at the Brown School, he became the cub sports-reporter and the last printers devil for the community newspaper. He negotiated the $3-a-story commitment as a way of getting out of gym class. He continued writing for small-town newspapers in Massachusetts and Colorado, and expanded his love of writing to magazines, and seven previous books. Alan wrapped up his 50-year career in print journalism by being an adjunct journalism professor in Denver, a founding board member of the American chapter of the London-based International Communications Forum, and Co-Director of the Southern African Media Alliance. He serves as the third historian for the Denver Press Club.

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Copyright © 2008 by Alan J. Kania.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Better Than Money

Sanest Man in Mesa County

Hot on the Trail

Boostingly Yours, John Otto

Colorado National Park

The Great Grand Mesa

To Honor and Obey

Story Without an End

Good Roads Day

National Park-to-Park Highway

Bison and Elk and Deer, Oh My!

Swan Song

missing image file

Preface

The pioneer spirit of the West has produced its share of strange and colorful characters. In the early years of the last century, a lonely vagabond named John Otto waged a single-handed battle to set aside a maze of rock amphitheaters and monoliths that loom five hundred feet out of the canyons for the benefit of the entire nation. He did so at a time when the national park idea was just coming into focus. Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Mount Ranier were established as federally protected lands, but there was as yet no national park service to manage them with any consistent philosophy. Park custodians were hired for token salaries, usually a dollar a month. Among those custodians, John Otto was, without question, the most eccentric and flamboyant.

Such was his dedication to the canyons that were to eventually become Colorado National Monument, where he spent most of his years building trails in solitude. At one time, he was married in a ceremony at the base of Independence Monument, a 500-ft. rock monolith that stands alone in one of the major canyons of the national monument. In numerous (and often seemingly pointless and endless) letters to local newspapers, in relentless pleas to the park service bureaucracy in Washington, and by means of flamboyant publicity stunts (such as hanging giant homemade flags a thousand feet across the breadth of one of the canyons), Otto promoted the monument with all the timidity of P. T. Barnum.

His peculiar behavior often upset the Victorian values of turn-of-the-century America. Between 1902 and 1907, he was locked up three times for acute mania in order to protect government officials from his irascible and odd—but never violent—behavior. Although his patriotism was scarcely questioned, his manner of expressing it was considered eccentric, if not downright insane. His manner of dress further aroused suspicion. Often he wore a green shirt with different colored stars for buttons, each star presumably sumbolic of something significant in the depths of his creative imagination. At other times, he wore the blue coveralls of the mining trade, calling himself Blue Boy in his early correspondence with political leaders. But he was, above all, a gentle soul who simply wanted Americans to appreciate their sublime geography. He was, in his own words, ‘The World’s Greatest Radical of the Safe Kind."

Success, of sorts would indeed soon come to John Otto. After landing in Colorado, he began to follow the local political issues with frenzied enthusiasm. But his bizarre way of expressing himself was often misunderstood, especially by the governor of Colorado.

John Otto was a character. While working on Grand Mesa, for example, he would wear an old pair of overalls. After wearing out the knees of the overalls, he simply put the pants on backwards and wore out the backsides of the knees before discarding them. In order to get food, he occasionally poached from local ranchers, despite his public contempt for the ranchers who continued to graze their cattle in the canyons. One rancher could not understand why his cow returned to the ranch already milked on a regular basis. Then one day, Otto was spotted with a milk pail in hand, walking down the hill toward the cow. Occasionally a young calf would also disappear from the vicinity of Otto’s camp on the trail.

To bathe in the wilderness, Otto poured cement in one of the hollowed-out sandstone crevices in the rimrocks. His tub had a natural drainage hole at one end, and a hand-whittled sandstone rock served as the plug. Another bathtub was placed in the canyon floor. A metal tub was spring fed, and a small wood-burning stove was arranged so John could take a hot bath during the winter.

John Otto is an obsession with me. As I wrote my first book (John Otto of Colorado National Monument, 1981), the experience was like spending three years with a distant uncle. John was strange—an unsung hero for independent thinking in the West—a visionary and a man who was unappreciated long after his death. Even his family members did not appreciate their eccentric relative because John was not one who communicated well with them. He kept to himself in life, but he took great pride in the art of writing letters to an often unappreciative audience of newspaper editors, politicians, the National Park Serice, and his nemeses at the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce.

After John Otto of Colorado National Monument was published, I received a call from an assistant attorney general for the federal courts. Mr. Kania, did you write a book about John Otto? Nervously, I answered affirmatively, thinking that certainly I was in trouble. We checked the footnotes in the book…—immediately my palms began to sweat as I was sure that some obscure issue of plagiarism would send me to federal prison— . . . and we found the material to be extremely accurate. Phew, now I could exhale. We’d like to hire you as a professional witness in a land-dispute case that involves one of John Otto’s trails.

To help prepare for the trial, I was hired to do more research, scouring newspapers that had not been microfilmed, but were stored under the watchful collective eyes of my friends at the Mesa County Public Library in Grand Junction. I originally made the mistake of thinking the Grand Junction Daily News was the same as the Grand Junction Weekly News. Once I started researching the daily edition, however, I discovered the editor published two completely different editions of the paper; rarely did the stories in the weekly edition appear in the daily edition. By reopening my search for new Otto letters and reports, I was able to secure newspaper accounts and more of John’s letters and advertisements to fill in the gaps left in my previous book.

Several items seen during my research for my first book disappeared when I tried to review them again at their respective repositories. Letters contained in the court papers on John’s arrest in Fruita, Colorado, were missing, and papers originally found in the federal archives could not be located when I returned five years later. When I contacted one distant relative to see if family members had any of Otto’s photos or letters, I was told they had a whole box of letters—but threw them out the week before because they thought Uncle John was just an eccentric member of the family.

The wealth of information about John Otto came from the letters he wrote to regional newspapers. They were published as op-ed pieces and letters to the editor. When editors grew tired of Otto’s ramblings, the letters were published as paid advertising. The vast number of attributions for primary-source letters that comprise Otto’s records are documented in the University Press of Colorado edition of John Otto: Trials and Trails. They have been omitted from this edition of the John Otto story.

Some patron saints to historical packrat-ism will forever be on my personal pedestal. Eleanor Robeson provided me with several family snapshots of John Otto of Grand Mesa, some of which are published for the first time in this book. Bud and Phyllis Bradbury, the son-in-law and daughter of R. A. Anderson who owned the fruit orchards on the palisades of Grand Mesa, told me of a John Otto trail above their property. When Mr. Anderson took me on a field trip to the head of the trail, I was able to confirm the authenticity of a photograph I had incorrectly identified as the Corkscrew Trail in my first book.

And then there were Rex and Margaret Taylor, the daughter and son-in-law of Whipple Chester, John Otto’s best man at his 1911 wedding at the base of Independence Monument. In my first book, I used the wedding certificate to identify Joe Keifer as Otto’s best man, but Whipple Chester’s correspondence with John Otto and several newspaper accounts indicate that Keifer probably was just the person available when Rev. Hatch needed someone to sign the marriage papers. It was the journalistic skills of Whipple Chester and his professional photography that provided the backbone for the story of John Otto. And I will always be grateful to his daughter for her foresight in preserving the family history.

Other people like the Benge family in Grand Junction, reached deep into their family albums to find pictures of John Otto during his many public relation trips into the canyons of the monument or the plateaus of Grand Mesa. A great many other photographic expeditions were described in the newspapers, but those photographs have never surfaced.

With much regret, another document was lost in preparation for this book. Grand Valley history-buff Bob Beverly loaned a copy of a topographical map that showed some of the early trails Otto built in the Colorado National Monument. These trails do not appear on subsequent editions of the maps. When the map was sent to a print shop to be copied, they lost the map. While I was able to have a full-color digital reproduction of another map with Otto’s early trails from the archives of the U.S. Geological Survey to replace the loss, I do deeply regret the loss of such an important artifact from Mr. Beverly’s personal collection.

Two of the great mysteries of Otto’s story involve the whereabouts of the eclectic flags flown on heavy cables John single-handedly stretched across thousand-foot-wide canyons. As of this writing, none of them has ever been recovered. His guest registers, placed in various spots around the Colorado National Monument and Grand Mesa have likewise never been found.

Others have helped turn John Otto into a cult hero. Bob Fisher brought back the tradition of posting an American flag atop Independence Monument by climbing the sheer rock pinnacle—without the aide of Otto’s pipe ladder that had been removed by the Park. Robert Benton, Paul Jensen and others also rediscovered some of Otto’s campsites and shelters and added to the heritage of the monument’s most celebrated camper.

And there were park employees including Sally Crum who recorded local interviews with those who knew John, Pat Miller who recovered national park archives from the labyrinth of the federal records center in Washington, D.C.; and Margaret Short, chief naturalist, who hired me as a temporary park-service employee during the Centennial/Bi-Centennial celebration in 1976 to sift through the park’s photographic records. Joining me on Otto expeditions were Jan Ryan, Char Quist, Robert Henderson, Sherry Hall and other park rangers. Beth Kaeding, Claudia Rector, and Dusty Dunbar of the Colorado National Monument Association were major ambassadors for John Otto, keeping interest in his story alive at the visitor’s center. John Otto artifacts have been located and cataloged, thanks to park rangers like Hank Schoch. During Hank’s tenure at the Colorado National Monument, he took it upon himself to hike some of the most remote parts of the canyons, locating and cataloging Otto’s campsites and other evidence of John’s own tenure in the monument.

While spending all my spare time at the Mesa County Public Library, I would be visited by Dave Sundal. A fellow history buff, Dave provided microfilm copies of Otto letters he came across during his own research. George Van Camp, former library curator, and his dedicated crew of Terry Pickens, Barbara Buttolph Wetherell, Marjorie McKinney, Linda Garey and others provided me with the dusty copies of newspapers that provide much of the new material found in the second edition of the John Otto story.

My debt also goes to the Stan Oliner, former curator of manuscripts and documents for the Colorado State Historical Society, who will benefit from the research of this book. Stan’s obsession with and interest in John Otto and Beatrice Farnham helped spur my research. He was also instrumental in bringing together key contributors to this manuscript to provide the primary research for this work.

The California side of the John Otto story was gathered through the dedicated research of Ellen Brannick, community liaison representative of Napa State Hospital, and Mary-Ellen Jones, who took on this project before retiring from the Bancroft Library. Ms. Brannick provided hospital annual reports, photographs, and newspaper clippings about Napa State Hospital during the period when John Otto was a fallen man at their facility. Ms. Jones found a wealth of information about John’s time at Napa by locating Otto’s letters to Governor Pardee. The letters were cataloged at Bancroft under the classification Crank Letters. Virtually all of Chapter 1 in this book was made possible through the generosity of Mary-Ellen Jones, Ellen Brannick, Napa State Hospital and the Bancroft Library.

Locating primary research on John Otto was a nearly impossible goal. Archivists and historically curious friends provided individual gems along the way. Among them (in no particular order) are Brian A. Reynolds, county librarian, and Kathey Fueston, Reference librarian, both with the Siskiyou County Public Library in Yreka, Calif.; Christine Sellman, curator, and Michael Henderyx of the Siskiyou County Museum in Yreka; David L. Snyder, archivist, of the California State Archives in Sacramento; Donald R. Michael, county clerk, County of Humboldt, Calif.; Virginia H. Smith, reference librarian, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.; Susan Moon, Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library; Judy Prosser-Armstrong, archivist/registrar, Museum of Western Colorado, Grand Junction, Colo.; Lowell H. Zuck, librarian, Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society, Webster Groves, Mo.; Jean K. Howard, director of medical records, Napa State Hospital, Napa, Calif.; Jack and Joan Kruckenberg, Grand Junction, Colo.; Mrs. J. M. Gurnett, supervisor of adult services, Tufts Library, Weymouth, Mass.; and George W. Hunt, North Weymouth, Mass.

Last but by absolutely no means least, I want to thank the family of John Otto. Marcia Rowe, Eleanor K. Robeson, Dan Otto, Gertrude Otto Hughes, Miles and Zita Lundahl, and Jack H. Otto who provided the motivation to write this biography of one of my favorite characters of history. I can only claim John Otto as a literary friend and companion; they and their relatives can legitimately claim John Otto as their previously uncelebrated family member. I thank you all for the use of family photographs and your kind words and inspiration while I was writing this book.

Many people have been turned onto John Otto as a result of these books, and their letters have been most gratifying. Several people have written to tell me they have used Otto’s cryptic references to trails as a guidebook for solving the mysteries of the hermit of Monument Canyon. I have written this edition with these individuals in mind—I have given them more information and new clues in hope they will get off the beaten paths of the Colorado National Monument and discover beautiful canyons that most tourists will never see.

On June 19, 2002, approximately seventy-five people honored the 50th Anniversary of the passing of John Otto. Michael O’Boyle began the John Otto Memorial Headstone Project a decade earlier while giving tours in the Colorado National Monument. Together with historian Dave Fishell and Karen Kllanxhja, O’Boyle made arrangements to create a fitting graveside tribute to Otto.

Since I had never designed a headstone, especially a monumental headstone, O’Boyle wrote in the August 2002 edition of the Colorado National Monument Association’s The Monolith, I turned to someone who turns dreams into reality for a living, artist and sculptor Lyle Nichols. Lyle recommended that I check with John Schmahl who quarries rock at Unaweep Canyon. With John’s help, we found a five-foot wide by two-foot tall, 3,400-pound, Precambrian metamorphic boulder to use as the base.

After visiting the Luokenen Brothers Stone Co. in Lyons, Colo., Karen and Mike found a miniature version of Independence Monument. The 600-700 pound slab was crafted and engraved by Dan and Kay Carlson and Donna Wiggins. O’Boyle personally transported the two-ton memorial to Yreka, Calif.

The top stone bears the words John Otto, Dec. 30, 1870-June 19, 1952. The base carries an Otto quotation, Do your best for the west. The best for the world. The new day, get it going. John Otto, Promoter and First Custodian of Colorado National Monument.

In a simple ceremony, the original pauper’s grave marker was removed. The American flag that flew on top of Independence Monument was removed from the new gravestone, folded, and given to the Town of Yreka.

And now I come to the question I am asked most often—was John Otto really crazy? Each reader must decide that independently. It has taken a lot of soul-searching during my work on this book to come up with my own answer to that question. I hope that as readers move through this book, they will take the time to read the very long quotations that I have left for them. John’s stream of consciousness cannot be reduced to sound bites. For instance, his views on Halley’s Comet may sound completely off-the-wall when one begins reading his lengthy letter to the editor of a local paper, but by the end of it, his eccentric logic may begin to make sense. To summarize or abbreviate his words would not do justice to what he tried to convey to the people of Grand Junction. When newspaper editors refused to publish John’s letters, he felt so strongly about his message that he purchased advertising space to ensure his words would remain unedited. I realize using long quotations is not the acceptable journalistic style of authors today, but I hope the reader will share my desire to remain historically accurate in presenting John Otto.

John Otto rests in a peaceful setting marked by an impressive marker provided by friends he never met. Other stranger friends have sought-out Otto’s trails, built by hand over a century ago. The same forces of nature that periodically disrupted his trail building have returned other trail amenities to Nature. Several now-departed Grand Junction residents told me Otto’s voice was rather high; there are no recordings of his voice. But through the archives of public libraries and historical societies, his words are preserved to provide important insight into the thoughts of a fascinating eccentric, and generous trail builder, John Otto.

About the cover: The cover art is based on a studio photograph of John Otto. While the original photographer is unknown, the pastel was done by Bryan Beedham, a British artist whom I had the pleasure of meeting in 1981 thanks to the efforts of a mutual friend, Dale Andersson. Born in England in the mid-30s, Bryan Beedham (pronounced Bee-Im) is a self-taught artist.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s when he first began painting in oils and acrylics with a high degree of success in England. However, during his first visit to Colorado in 1980, he became immensely interested in the art of the Rocky Mountain West. Simultaneously he began pastel painting which resulted in immediate success.

Already his talents have been shown in several galleries and although his subject matter is varied, his self-confessed love of depicting character is superbly shown in his pastel studies of people.

An Englishman deeply involved in the art of the West is certainly unusual, but his understanding of people ensures his talent is put to excellent use in his portrayal of faces of the old West.

Introduction

The following article appeared in the Grand Junction (Colorado) Daily Sentinel newspaper on April 19, 1909. The article was written by long-time John Otto supporter Walter Walker (later publisher of the newspaper) and serves as a fitting tribute to a man and the place that was his domain:

The people of Grand Junction little dream of the wonderful scenic grandeur that is almost at the gates of the city, and it is high time that there was an awakening to the fact of the presence of this marvelous scenic Beauty Paradise. We speak with knowledge and without the least desire or attempt at exaggeration when we state that within a few miles of Grand Junction there is an almost endless array of magnificent masterpieces of nature that make the world-famous Garden of the Gods at Colorado Springs sink into insignificance when a comparison is made.

With an equally conservative intention, we are free to declare that within a few miles of Grand Junction there is a world of natural beauty that will compare most favorably in beauty, sublime grandeur and awe-inspiring massiveness with any series of natural wonders to be found in the Rocky Mountain region. This may be considered by some as a broad and reckless statement. We might have so adjudged such statements up until yesterday when a personal investigation was all that was necessary to convince the writer and those with him of the truthfulness of the declaration that to the west and south of Grand Junction, within easy access, lies one of the most beautiful areas imaginable.

The opportunity to visit that section should be taken advantage of by hundreds of local people this spring and summer.

Especially should the skeptical and the doubting take this trip. The eyes of all will open wide in amazement, and it will be declared that the half has never yet been told. Grand Junction has a golden opportunity to be nationally known for the scenic wonders that are at its door as well as nationally known for the fruit and its climate.

. . . A word here about John Otto and his great work. Sentinel readers are familiar with this man. He is a peculiar, yet fascinating, a strange yet splendid fellow. Years ago he took up his residence in one of the canons near Fruita. From time to time he would work as a cowboy, then as a road builder and then on the ranches. His love for nature and her works has always been most pronounced—we might say, unusual. Long ago the people at Fruita began to call him a crank.

All the time he was endeavoring to arouse interest in the great play-ground and show-ground of nature. Few people knew anything of the undeveloped section of which he talked. Few paid any heed to his statements and his plans. He was put down as a dreamer. Perhaps he is a dreamer, but his dreams have a wonderful degree of materiality and substance. All the time he continued to explore the wild and rugged country, made up of canons and gorges, peaks and monuments, tablelands and benches, west and south of Grand Junction and south and west of Fruita.

John Otto is a young man of not more than thirty-seven years; tall, lithe, black-haired, a strong, good-looking face, well versed in current events, and possessing considerably more than an ordinary amount of education. Yet for years this man has lived alone in the mountains, has roamed and wandered over every mountain district within a hundred miles of this city. He knows the mountains and forests as few men do. He is familiar with the whims and habits of nature as few men are. So long has he devoted himself to this out-of-door hermit-like life that one could hardly imagine him existing among any different surroundings. He is a restless, tireless spirit. His physical endurance seems to be without a limit, and this man, without the expectation of a remuneration, single-handed and alone, has built a remarkable trail, making access to these canons and gorges possible, securing from time to time a few dollars with which to buy meager supplies or provisions, powder for blasting, tools, etc., and living all alone in the canons, miles from any other human habitation.

This is John Otto, the hermit and trail builder. It is hard to conceive that a man will devote his life to toil of the very hardest kind, to work that does not seem possible for one man to do without assistance, to work for which he is not even getting a common laborer’s hire, and yet he hates to lose a single day from work. He keeps steadily and rapidly at the big task he has set for himself and there is no question in the world but what he is doing is all simply out of love for nature and to realize his fond dream of having these canons and gorges and peaks developed into a great park and playground and their beauties appreciated. He is as enthusiastic as if he were getting a vast sum for his work.

During the past eighteen months, Otto has scaled the walls of the canons, traversed the benches and table lands marking out rude lines and courses for a foot trail and also for a wagon road. He, some months ago, practically finished this crude survey and engineering work and it is astounding to view the courses he has outlined for the trail and wagon road along the steep and apparently impassable walls of these canons. But he has done it and he doesn’t claim to be an engineer or surveyor. This work is nothing short of remarkable.

About February 1st before the snows had melted in these canons and mountains, John Otto, with no assistance whatever other than tools and the services of his three burros and three ponies, began the work of building the first lap or leg of Otto’s Trail.

This was what the gentlemen found yesterday. After leaving their carriage in a little ravine at the end of the dirt road, the beginning of a trail was found on the steep bank of a little mountain stream. Then began a gradual but decided ascent on the sides and canon walls. John Otto’s trail had been found. For an hour the party increased as progress was made. This trail, built for the accommodation of a pedestrian or a person on horseback, is made of a remarkably gradual and easy grade yet the ascent is decided at all times. As it is ascended, the traveler from time to time looks down into deep gulches and gorges whose depths would be reached very hurriedly and disastrously if a stumble or mis-step was made at various points along the trail that Otto has built. Yet so firmly and so successfully has this man hewed out, blasted out, walled up or dug out of the various sections of this trail that if the man or animal is sure-footed, little danger is to be feared. Even as the traveler proceeds, he can look out over the vast expanse of the beautiful valley and to the mountains that stretch away in every direction. Frequently in looking upward and toward the hillside, the traveler views mighty walls of granite or sandstone with numerous cliffs rising several hundred feet in height, with perpendicular walls. It is certainly a rare treat to follow such a trail. After about an hour the traveler comes to Evergreen Spring, a spring of everlasting, pure and cold mountain water, discovered last year by Otto, named by him.

Otto walled up this spring in such a manner that there is at all times a big quantity of the sparkling water on hand and he has a drinking cup there for the accommodation of the thirsty traveler. The spring is just under an immense monument of rock called by Otto, Columbus Monument. This is a lovely spot and the climbing trail is again taken up and traveled for another two miles and the vistas and scenic pictures unfolded must be seen to be appreciated. At the end of these two miles, the party came to a small creek and on the opposite bank in a cluster of trees was found Trail Camp, the camp of John Otto, the hermit trail builder. This was as far as he has completed the trail. Therefore, in a period of less than three months, this man has constructed alone and single handed four miles of difficult winding and marvelous pathways along precipitous cliffs and hillsides, making up one of the prettiest trails that is at once exhilarating and magnificent. Time and again along this trail Otto has had to contend with immense rocks and what most men would consider impassible and [immovable]

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obstacles yet in some way he has gotten his trail over or around or through these obstacles. It is simply almost unbelievable, that a lone man could have accomplished such a task.

Otto moves his camp from time to time to keep in the neighborhood of the point of the trail on which he is working. He is now building toward the top of a great redstone mesa, the wall of which rises hundreds of feet above where his present camp is, yet he has mapped out the devious lines of the course he will take to get to the top and he proposes to have the trail completed to the top within another four or six weeks. To view the dangerous and steep sides of this frowning mountain-side, it would seem that he could never scale it much less construct a trail along its reaches. Yet yesterday Otto guided the party from the city along the proposed route of this trail and with the aid of ropes and tree limbs and with this man pointing out every step to take, the members of the party finally scaled the cliffs and reached the top. The view from there is indescribable in its beauty.

Then Otto guided the party across a wild yet beautiful table land and then another great bench or mesa was scaled and the party attained an altitude of some 6,700 feet and from the solid flat rock surface of a high mesa were able to look upon the most inspiring and extensive panorama of valleys, hills, snow-capped mountains, imaginable. Grand Junction, Fruita, the great sweep of orchards, the Grand Mesa, the Bookcliffs, the Unaweep mountains, the crest of the Continental Divide at a point near Lake City, are just a few of the many things to be seen from this magnificent height. Then going south a little way, Otto brought the party to a point where a look downward brought into view a big section of the wonderful Monument Canon and Chackleton Canon, with their myriad of natural monuments and wonderful rock walls. It was a glorious view.

No further time will be occupied in describing the beauties of these canons, including Seven Per Cent Canon, Horse Shoe Canon, Red Canon, the series of great benches of granite and sandstone, the forest of pinions and scrub cedars, the wild flowers, the deep gorges of this great playground of nature of which our people know so little and yet which is just at our door.

A word about the great monuments or rock monsters. Anyone of them is worth making a trip many miles to see. The Garden of the Gods has nothing to compare with what Otto calls Jefferson Monument. It is a mighty pile of rock standing out alone, rising to a height of about 325 feet, about 75 feet across at the base and perhaps 30 feet in diameter at the top, absolutely unscalable, a grim and wonderful sentinel of nature. Then there are more than a score of others of these mighty giants scattered through this wonderful series of canons and gorges. They are sights never to be forgotten. There are a multitude of other queer works of nature. In one place there is a crack in a mountain, about the width of a man’s body and over 100 feet long, and not less than 500 feet deep, one end of the crack admitting light from a deep gorge. The draft of air coming up from below and out of this crack is overpowering in its force.

We might go on for a long period naming beauties to be seen in this world of nature’s richness of which John Otto is the presiding genius, but space will not permit. We have made no exaggerations whatever.

People of