The poem, “America the Beautiful”, was written by Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College, in 1893. She had traveled by train to Colorado Springs, CO and had been inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the wheat fields of Kansas and, finally, the view from Pike’s Peak where the words to the poem began to come to her.  It is interesting to think of people taking wagons up this mountain (the original summit house was built in 1873).  The last picture certainly helps one understand why these mountains are named the Rocky Mountains.  In that picture there are a couple of people out on the boulders and it gives you an idea of the size of those rocks.