What we know
Sandstone landmark east of Palmer Lake. Samuel Seymour drew it as 'the Castle Rock' for the Long expedition on July 11, 1820, the day the party collected the blue columbine; later called Arched Rock and 'Phoebe's Arch' (probably Dr. Thompson's name, about 1887), and Elephant Rock by 1894 (McFarling in Sabin, S-0019, pp. 11-12, 22). A favorite Chautauqua picnic (Freed & Barber, S-0101); the Chamber of Commerce put a marker for it on Highway 105 after 1956.
Where it was
USGS GNIS summit 'Elephant Rock', El Paso County (2021 Colorado file); the 1976 survey's 'elephant rock, 1½ mi. e. & s. of palmer lake' (B56, S-0101) agrees. Good to a few hundred feet.
Sources
- S-0006: USGS Geographic Names Information System, Colorado file, 2021-08-25 edition
- S-0019: Marion Savage Sabin, Palmer Lake: A Historical Narrative, ed. Lloyd McFarling; 2nd ed. by Roger Davis; "Fifth Edition" (Palmer Lake: Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2019); first published Denver: Sage Books, 1957
- S-0073: Lloyd McFarling, "News from the Town of Monument, 1874–79," The Colorado Magazine 35, no. 3 (July 1958), pp. 193–208
- S-0101: Elaine Freed and David Barber, Historic Sites & Structures, El Paso County, Colorado ([Colorado Springs]: prepared for the El Paso County Land Use Department, [1977]), 56 pp., with the survey photographs in PPLD's Historic Sites and Structures collection
Sources are named in the text above. Numbers such as S-0080 refer to our source list. Most newspaper quotations were read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. Long quotations from recent books are shortened here.