Ahead of Red Rock Canyon opening in 2005 to be one of Colorado Springs’ favorite public grounds, Stewart Green was tasked with establishing climbing routes across the sandstone walls. This led him to naming some of the formations. One was the unmistakable behemoth appearing to submerge near the park’s center — “the whale,” Green called it.
Imagine his surprise when he was reading a rumination by Helen Hunt Jackson, penned 129 years earlier. “One on the right looks like a gigantic red whale,” wrote the author of historic acclaim. “It was like, Oh my God, she saw the exact same thing I did,” Green said.
“That was just kind of one of those ‘aha’ moments.” There are plenty more moments like that for the modern, Springs-based reader of “Bits of Travel at Home” — the readers whose surroundings will sound familiar, no matter the vast changes of time. Jackson’s 1878 travelog explores the writer’s home region back East, California and the home she came to adore in Colorado.
A Springs native born in 1953 and author himself, Green has republished those Colorado bits along with his own reflections in a book available for digital download. In an era defined by growth and controversial development around his hometown, Green thought the timing right to bring “Bits of Travel” back to light in a way that he never saw done before. “I had re-read it back at the start of COVID, and I was like, ‘You know, this book is so good,’ and it gives you such a.
