File:Garden of the Gods and Pike's Peak, by William H. Jackson.jpg

English: Garden of the Gods and Pike's Peak, by William H. Jackson. Mammoth-plate photograph by the renowned western landscape photographer, William H. Jackson. A prolific photographer of the West, Jackson gained fame for photographic views made while he was a part of the famous 1870 U.S. Geological Survey team under Ferdinand V. Hayden, which explored vast swaths of Colorado, Utah, Montana and Wyoming, including parts of Yellowstone.

[Jackson] recounted that the Hayden Expedition was 'priceless, it gave me a career."... Like a child thrown into a pool, Jackson learned to swim as a landscape photographer by suddenly encountering inaccessible terrain he might never have approached otherwise" - Naef, Era of Exploration: the Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885, page 221.

The present large-scale photograph is fine view of the Garden of the Gods and Pike's Peak was likely made circa 1880, by which time Jackson had fully formed his own aesthetic perspective:

Jackson was artistically on his own between 1873 and 1875, a time when the goals and structure of the Hayden Survey were themselves changing. During these years he traveled in a small party over great distances to photograph exactly what he felt was worthy, and this independence is evident in the photographs - Naef, Era of Exploration: the Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885, page 224.