The San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado define the four corners region. They dominate the skyline from a vast area of Utah, New Mexico and Colorado. Their massive peaks block the clouds fleeing the great Sierra Nevada far to the west and produce rain and snow that fills rivers and streams giving life to the dry lands surrounding them. Visiting the San Juan Mountains may be one of life’s great pleasures, and we did just that.
The San Juan Mountains are the mother of the Rio Grande, the San Juan River, the Navajo River, the Uncompahgre River, and the Gunnison to the north. Tiny springs multiply below deep beds of wildflowers and run together into noisy streams that cascade off cliffs or dribble among snow banks left like abandoned memories of winter’s past.
Colorado and New Mexico have many other beautiful mountains but the San Juan’s excel with their massive form, their huge wilderness, their rivers and their remoteness relative to the human hype of the rest of America. They stand with their sub-layers of Colorado Plateau and ancestral Rockies rock crowed by the remains of massive volcanoes that jarred the region with unimaginable violence and pollution 38 million years ago, armoring the San Juan Mountains with basalts and baking the sedimentary rocks below them. The hot springs and heat from the volcanoes distilled minerals into veins and the eons of post eruption erosion made possible the richest mineral strikes in American history.
Reporters from Rocky Mountain Beer Explorer set off to visit the San Juan’s this month to report back to you on the various goings-on up there and to try various beers and trails.
We began our trip in Santa Fe and drove to Durango where we found the evening air filled with the smell of a wet forest fire. The 416 Fire just north of town had been burning through June with big plumes of smoke and the attendant human drama associated with any forest fire. Now the “thank you firefighters” banners are soggy from rain and hundreds of firefighters have mostly left, heading northward as the fire season moves north and west.
Durango has had a hard summer. The historic Durango and Silverton Railroad was not only responsible (apparently) for inadvertently starting the 416 Fire with an ember from a steam engine, the railroad shut down with the high fire danger, crippling the town’s economy and leaving tourists looking for something to do instead. As it is, Durango struggles to keep its tourists in town for more than a day and the shuttered train left people poking around Main Avenue, many of them secretly wishing they could buy marijuana if only their family members would look the other way.
Durango is full of tourists in the summer, largely from states to the southeast where the weather is very hot and very humid and the boredom of suburban life an endless church finally causes some people to leave for the mountains. If you want to see what these people look like, go to the south end of Main Ave in Durango or to Silverton or Ouray. Its a human zoo.
We found that you can get away from most Texans by choosing a more upscale restaurant or walking on a trail. If you go to the low budget food places, watch out. And the walking trails are almost entirely devoid of southerners. After all, walking is painful and its much easier to sit in a car or on an off road vehicle than to endure the pain of hiking.
We had an excellent meal in the Mahogany Grille at the Strater Hotel in Durango and retreating to our historic Hotel Rochester with its ghosts and its great staff. There we sat on the steps and drank some Ska (beer) and watched the town trees perk up with the afternoon’s much needed rain. We went down to the river walk and saw the Amish women gawking at a hipster wedding in the park, and the Utes and the mountain bikers among others. We saw the river flowing slowly among its rocks, in no hurry to flow out into the waiting desert.
On the Road:
We started our loop away from Durango on Highway 160, skirting the south edge of the La Plata Mountains and the great Mount Hesperus which is one of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo people. They call this mountain Mount Hesperus Dibé Nitsaa which means Big Sheep or mountain sheep after the many mountain sheep the Dine observed on the peak long ago. It is also known as mountain of darkness to the Navajo.
Onward into the broad green valleys that gather around the base of the mountains. Mancos, little town with a brewery and the turn off to the Dolores Canyon and eventually Rico and Telluride. There’s a good natural foods store here and an old section of historic main street where you can look down wistfully into the creek.
On Highway 160 we go on to Mesa Verde National Park, a great outpost of the National Park Service since the 1902 when the park was formed to protect the amazing ruins that the early Pueblos left scattered around the long mesas and in the cliff faces of this sandstone.
The road to Mesa Verde climbs 2000 feet above the valley below. Once you’ve struggled up through layer after layer of strata, the views are among the best in the western US. You can see Sleeping Ute Mountain, the Henry Mountains, the La Sals and the San Juan’s look distant. The Cortez Valley spreads out west to the dry country where the Dolores River leaves the high country and cuts through bright red canyons in country filled with the ruins of early Pueblo sites, many of them showing evidence of strife and conflict when they were abandoned around 1300.
I think everyone who travels in the West has seen the cliff palaces of Mesa Verde with their silent stone walls in the overhangs of sandstone that overlook wild canyons draining south into the desert near Shiprock. We broke out of the routine and went to Long House which is on its own mesa west of the most visited part of the park. Once we finished with the excellent tour by the NPS ranger, we went to see Badger House which is among a really old group of Pueblo ruins protected by serious concrete and metal buildings that shelter these post-pit-house era ruins from the ravages of the weather. If you are interested in the early Pueblo, Mesa Verde is unsurpassed and the National Park Service has done their best to protect it.
Even so, Mesa Verde faces threats from humanity. Horses wander in from the Ute Reservation to the south and they trample archaeological sites and leave large piles of crap everywhere. The NPS is working to fence the park and lure these unclaimed horses out. You’ll also notice that most of the park has been burned by high severity fire in the past 30 years and these fires have changed douglas fir and ponderosa pine forests into vast areas of gamble oak. The firs and pines will never grow back. This is the sort of type-conversion we are seeing all across the West as the climate warms and dries.
By evening we had left Mesa Verde and caught Colorado Highway 145 to Dolores where we encountered a blasting hail and rain storm that turned the normally clear Dolores River a deep red from the eroding Mesozoic sandstones that line the river from the town of Dolores well up the river towards Rico.
Dolores has come a long way from its old days of being a ranching town. With ranching dying in the West, Dolores is enjoying support from the many visitors who come through to fish, go to various reservoirs and hike. This is an ideal location with the mountains very close, plenty of water nearby and not too far to Durango. Dolores even has a brewery which is hard to believe because the town is so small. We’ll have to wait for our next trip to visit the brewery.
We’ll continue our great San Juan circle drive in our next blog post.
Shame about all them Texans….