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Majestic Fourteeners Colorado's Highest by George Crouter
Majestic Fourteeners - Colorados Highest BY George Crouter
Hardbound with clear plastic covering
144 pages
A Sundance Pictorial
Copyright 1977
Map of each section with photographs.
Altitudes
FOREWORD
If we look for grandeur in mountain form, what is more
grand than the great mountain under our feet?
Franklin Rhoda, Hayden Survey, 1875
A century later, George Crouter, veteran photographer for The Denver Post, swallowed hard as he recalled a trip into the high country of Colorado. "A chill ran up and down my spine," he said, "and I had to fight back the tears as I stood in the midst of those beautiful mountains and looked out over what seemed hundreds of peaks, all rising ever so majestically. I was so awe-stricken by my surroundings that it was several minutes before I could get about my business."
Crouter's business was photographing Colorado's Highest - all of the state's 53 peaks with elevations of 14,000 feet or more, commonly known as the Fourteeners.
Crouter traveled hundreds of miles - on foot and horse, in car, four-wheeler and plane - to put together what turned out to be one of the most popular series ever published by Empire Magazine, the Sunday magazine of The Denver Post. Most of the photographs in this book first appeared in the 28-part series that Empire ran during 1976 as a tribute to Colorado's Centennial as a state and the nation's Bicentennial birthday.
Six years before Colorado gained statehood, a then-obscure photographer in Omaha, Nebraska, 27-year-old William Henry Jackson, was hired by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden to work with him in his survey of the Western territories. Hayden, whose surveys (including four of Colorado, 1873 through 1876) laid the foundations for much of our knowledge of the Rocky Mountains, recognized the importance of photography in "securing truthfulness in the representation of mountains and other scenery."
In a March 15, 1877, letter to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, Hayden emphasized the significance of photographs in "securing faithful views of the many unique and remarkable features of newly explored territory." Truth in pictures was particularly important because some art forms had been giving false notions to people back East of
how our Western mountains really looked. "Twenty years ago," Hayden wrote, "hardly more than caricatures existed - mountains were represented with angles of 60 degrees inclination, covered with great glaciers, and modeled upon the type of any other than the Rocky Mountains."
And so Jackson and other journalists accompanied the Hayden geographical and geological surveys; their reports, writings and photographs greatly popularized the West. It was Jackson who first photographed the Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado's Sawatch Range, and Hayden's men were the first to write about the ancient Indian cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. The Hayden men and their guests combined scientific skill, artistic sketching, photographic techniques and stamina as they worked the Colorado mountains from predawn to nightfall. The pleasures of their work came, as they did to photographer George Crouter, in the compensating scenic surroundings. The Hayden men, although preoccupied in their mapping, surveying, sketching and figuring, still found time to enjoy and marvel at the snow-capped peaks, as well as the fertile valleys below and the wildlife that have always called the mountains their home.
Colorado is the highest and most mountainous state in the contiguous United States, with an average elevation of nearly 7,000 feet. And, as one reader, David Sundal of Grand Junction, Colorado, wrote to Empire Magazine: "Mighty mountains are what we Coloradans find most inspiring about our state."
As long as there are mountains, there will, be men and women to enjoy them and photographers (like 19th Century Jackson and 20th Century Crouter) to photograph them. And, it is comforting to know that these mountains belong to you and me. Thus, it is to all of us who enjoy, respect, love and admire the mountains of Colorado that this book is dedicated.
Carl Skiff, Editor Empire Magazine
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