Billowing white steam almost swallows a passenger train as it hugs the sheer rock walls of Byers Canyon — a breathtaking gorge carved by the Colorado River through Grand County that the Moffat Road's surveyors were forced to thread in the early 1900s. The hand-colored image shows the locomotive emerging from a curve along a riprap embankment, the rushing river filling the left foreground and a cathedral wall of granite rising to the right, topped by a dense crown of dark evergreens. Byers Canyon, named for newspaper editor William, was one of the most photographed challenges on the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific line, and postcards of this scene were eagerly purchased by tourists riding what promoters billed as "the scenic line of the world." The card number 8490 places it slightly earlier in the print run than many Moffat Road issues, making it a fine specimen for mountain-railroad and Colorado-history collectors alike.