Colorado Springs & Garden of the Gods

In Girl in the Glass, when James and Declan escape from Washington, D.C., their journey takes them to Colorado Springs.

Colorado Springs is a city nestled in the Rocky Mountain foothills, at the base of Pikes Peak, the 14,107-foot-high mountain first spotted by Zebulon Pike in 1806. Originally referred to as Pike’s Highest Peak, the government simplified the name to Pikes Peak. The views from Pikes Peak were the inspiration for the song "America the Beautiful".

Colorado Springs was initially Kansas Territory, part of the land purchased from France in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The city wasn’t officially founded until 1871, just a few years before Colorado became a state in 1876. The area, however, was popular beforehand, with a gold rush in the 1850s bringing prospectors to the area. It was also popular with health seekers, the fresh air seen as a treatment for tuberculosis, as well as hunters and trappers.

This is why, in 1848, the trapper Jacob Spaulding was here, exploring the area, when he found a massive cave hidden beneath North Gateway Rock in the Garden of the Gods. Originally known as the Red Rock Corral, the Garden of the Gods contains massive fins of deep red and bright pink rock jutting out from the surrounding land. These stone spires were created by the same mountain-building forces that created the Rocky Mountains, lifting ancient seabeds and tilting them vertically. As James and Declan learn, the Garden of the Gods and Spaulding’s cave play a pivotal role in the Clypeate’s history, bringing Nikola Tesla to the area in 1898.

After the attack on Clypeate headquarters in Washington, D.C., the search for Spaulding’s journal brought Mr. Tesla to Colorado Springs. As a cover for his real motivation, Mr. Tesla built the Tesla Experimental Station here, ostensibly to study the use of high-voltage, high-frequency electricity in wireless power transmission.