Through the Colorado Rockies

This is one of many "Travel Talks" by James A. FitzPatrick, "The Voice of the Globe" a Technicolor short that occasionally shows on Turner Classic Movies. This is an interesting time capsule from an age before interstates and tourist traps along the roadsides.

Balanced Rock and Stone Ship are a couple of tourist attractions shown, although there weren't very many tourists at the time. A train was shown going through bottom of the Royal Gorge, which would have been an interesting experience (I don't know if Amtrak goes through there).

This probably caused more people to want to go to the Colorado Rockies than could at the time due to wartime shortages.

James A. Fitzpatrick sends the Technicolor cameras to Colorado, with Virgil Miller there to make sure they don't fall off a cliff in this handsome Traveltalks episode.

Fitzpatrick offers his usual series of almanac facts, but his manner of speaking has calmed down over the decade he had been doing these. Although he likes to throw in the occasional long words to show off his learning, he isn't shouting them in the manner of a man deafened by his own voice.

There's just the slightest hint of halo due to the Technicolor elements shrinking at different rates, but the beauty of the images shines through in the copy that plays on Turner Classic Movies.

Traveltalks visits Colorado. It's the war years and they are staying in country. It's lovely. It's outdoors. It's a lot of nature. It starts with a long bridge. There is fly fishing. Most of all, I love some surf boarding in a canal. Men on stilts picking peaches is interesting and looks funny. One thing this can never be is exotic. There are very few people and no city travel. It's a family RV vacation in a national park. That's what this is. It's not that great, but it's nice... like a family vacation. This is the home movie of that trip except for the surf boarding. Nobody in my family would do that.

Man's ingenuity and engineering skill is what comes to mind when you watch this Traveltalk episode from the color series, steeped as it is in the grandeur of Colorado's Rocky Mountains and some of its high points including Pike's Peak, at 14,000 ft. above sea level.

We see tourists converging on the scene for Easter sunrise service; the highest suspension bridge in the world across Royal Gorge; fishermen enjoying their sport in 6,000 miles of streams with abundant trout; and the sight of curving railroad tracks going deep into the mountainous area looking like toy trains dwarfed by the huge surrounding terrain.

One of the more interesting Traveltalks from FitzPatrick who narrates with some country western music providing a background score.

Through the Colorado Rockies (1943)

*** (out of 4)

James A. FitzPatrick's TravelTalks series travels to Colorado where we get to see the beautiful rockies as well as various other sites. These other sites include Stone Ship, Balanced Rock, the famous trout fishing and the stilt peach picking. This is one of the better entries in the series because the Technicolor really jumps off the screen and brings the beauty of the rockies right into your living room. As with all the others in the series, we get the casual information about the location but this one here is just so pretty to the eyes that you can't help but wish you could be there for yourself. The scenes from the top of the mountains are an incredible view as as the sequences dealing with the train tracks and how they were built so close to the water.