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 over 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 glimpse back 150 years to what it used to be like when the town was first settled,” Green said. “You kinda wish you could go back there when it was so simple and uncrowded and beautiful.”

Maybe “the whale” emerged from his subconscious of past reading; Green first pored over “Bits of Travel” in the 1970s as a curious, rock-climbing 20-something in town. Green grew up close to North Cheyenne Cañon, home to Helen Hunt Falls. He grew up on Ramona Avenue, named for Helen Hunt Jackson’s seminal novel that sympathized the plight of Native Americans.

Green was mostly drawn to Jackson’s sweeping, passionate work regarding the town they shared a century apart.

“Her writing was ingrained in my perception of Colorado Springs growing up,” Green said.

So it might be no wonder why he’s stuck around. Amid all the changes, Jackson’s romantic portrait of the Springs has remained ingrained.

That’s the portrait Green wanted brought to the modern reader — with some slight flourishes to chapters from the public domain. To engage today’s reader, Green edited some words and sentences.

In the process, he said he went to Evergreen Cemetery, to the plot not far from his parents.

“I went over to (Jackson’s) grave and talked to her about it,” Green siad. “Left her some flowers and told her what I was doing and hoped that would be OK.”

The essence is unchanged.

In essence, Colorado Springs was a place “laying due east of the Great Mountains and west of the sun.” For her unaware readers across the nation — the city had only been established two years prior to her arrival in 1873 — that’s how Jackson came to place it.

Her writing would linger on the sun and the colors it painted across the landscape.

The town was “a symphony of yellow and red,” she wrote, calling to mind Austin’s Bluffs and Palmer Park in one direction, Red Rock Canyon and Garden of the Gods in the other. Jackson remarked on the “deep blue wall” of the Palmer Divide to the north, the plains to the east “which have all the beauty of the sea.” The sun would rise over that “shining carpet” and set over the mountains, casting an array: “fiery red at dawn, yellow in the first flood of sunrise, and purple just after the sun has set.”

Back to those mountains and canyons to the west: “(I)f one believes there is a city of angels, he must believe that these are the towers and gates therof.”

This was the land Jackson found as horses kicked up dust along the streets, irrigation canals carved onward and schools and churches rose. Also central to the city’s vision was natural splendor. Jackson, who came on the advice to improve her health, delighted in that most of all.

“I get the sense she just felt so much more alive here,” Green said.

From reading her diaries and biographies, he got the sense of deep pain back East. Jackson’s first husband, a military man, died in 1863. Her son died of an illness two years later, following the similarly sudden death of her firstborn.

A decade later in Colorado Springs, she was exploring her beloved Cheyenne Mountain when she met a solitary homesteader, who moved to those woods following the death of his wife. “Somehow, he kinder took to the woods,” Jackson wrote, concluding: “What an unconscious tribute there is in that phrase to nature’s power as a beneficent healer.”

She meets several other colorful characters in “Bits of Travel” — more ragged settlers, miners and railroaders across the frontier. She climbs to the dizzying heights of Mount Lincoln to tour mines. “Never enough of mines,” she responds to a guide who asks in Georgetown, proceeding to lower her down in a bucket as she wishes.

She ventures to the Royal Gorge and Boulder Canyon. She ventures also to the San Luis Valley, drawn by the Spanish Peaks she viewed from afar in Colorado Springs and by word of the railroad extending that way. Her solemn observation on La Veta Pass: “The wilderness had surrendered.”

Progress is inevitable. That’s clear from photos Green took for the repurposed book, showing the city spread over the wild places Jackson knew.

And yet Green is struck by images unchanged. Paired with Jackson’s words of envy, “I think they just help foster an appreciation for these places, and the sense of place we do have here” in the Springs, Green said.

The red whale is still here. Flowers still bloom; Jackson dedicated a whole chapter to them. Another chapter, of course, is dedicated to sunrises.

She didn’t get to live long in Colorado Springs before her death to cancer in 1885. But the sunrises she committed to memory.

She kept what she called a “calendar of sunrises.” She kept meticulous details, writing on how the colors played across the peaks and the plains, how the display changed with the clouds and the seasons. And how it was always worth admiring every waking moment, “no two days alike.”

Soon after this story went to press, Stewart Green died unexpectedly. For a story on the life of the rock climbing luminary, author and historian, go to Gazette.com. Green was 71.