The Colorado Rockies form the rugged high-country passage toward Roily, making the journey a test of terrain as well as distance. Their steep slopes, narrow ledges, and near-timberline grasslands frame two sharply contrasting mining sites: the neglected Enterprise Mine and the more recently maintained North Star Mine. Through those contrasts, the mountains become a landscape of both abandoned ambition and stubborn expectation.

Terrain and High Country

The route climbs through an aspen grove and a narrow canyon, where wheel ruts become increasingly visible. Higher up, the climb eases, though the horses must stop often to catch their breath. Near timberline, the trees give way to grassland broken only by scattered, small, wind-bent trees. The narrator recognizes why Red Muldoon brought cattle there during the summer, but is surprised that no cattle are present now.

The country is described as exceptionally rugged. From a narrow ledge, John Smith stops to look down into the canyon; the narrator, uneasy at the edge and concerned the ledge might peter out, would rather keep moving. He compares the Colorado Rockies with Montana, saying the latter’s rugged country seems like a series of hills beside them. The contrast registers the mountains’ scale through the difficulty and exposure of the passage, rather than through a detached landscape description.

The Mines in the Mountains

The Enterprise Mine stands ahead in a clearing, its years of neglect visible in broken windows, sagging doors, rusting machinery, and roofs collapsed under winter snow. Sun and wind have darkened the buildings to dingy gray. The narrator reads the scattered machinery and the size and variety of the buildings as signs of the scale of the original ambition, and thinks of old mines as graveyards of men’s dreams.

Kate Muldoon relates what her father told her about the Enterprise: its owners spent more than a million dollars developing it, but the company went broke. He did not know how much silver had been found; he had heard instead of Eastern investors who lost everything, including widows and elderly people who had lost their life savings. The mine’s ruins thus stand not only for a failed industrial venture but also for the human losses Kate’s account associates with it.

The North Star Mine offers a pointed contrast. Reached within an hour of leaving the Enterprise, it has no rusting machinery, broken windows, or sagging doors; it looks as though it had closed only the day before. Smoke rises from a shack, and a man comes out carrying a rifle at the ready. The narrator supposes that a watchman is there and that the owners may hope to reopen the mine if they can raise more capital, but these are his inferences, not confirmed plans. The visible signs of care and occupancy give the site a presentness absent from the Enterprise’s ruins.

Passage Toward Roily

After passing the North Star Mine, the riders find a road that looks recently used and begin descending. Roily comes into view below, its buildings appearing to the narrator like a toy village from childhood; another hour of travel brings the party into town. In this sequence, the mountains connect isolated mining ground to the settlement below while keeping the journey’s hazards and contrasts in view.

The two mines give the passage its defining counterpoint. At the Enterprise, failed investment survives as wrecked buildings and machinery; at the North Star, smoke and a watchman suggest that the possibility of renewed enterprise has not entirely died. Set against the difficult descent toward Roily, the mountain country holds both the material remains of past hopes and the fragile signs of hopes still being maintained.