Hadley spent the summer of 1924 renting a cottage in Indian Creek Park 8,600 feet up in the Colorado Rockies.

When he exhibited the watercolors from this trip back home in Indianapolis in September, Lucille Morehouse, critic for the Star, correctly observed: “The usual mountain picture is so ‘stand-offish,’ holds us so at a distance, but in these there seems to be a friendly hand stretched out to us.”