We're Broadmoor Hotel Guests, Get Us Out of Here

Cloud Camp lodge, above the Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs

Known its golf courses (plural), tennis club, riding stable, and other amenities, the sprawling Broadmoor Hotel on the edge of Colorado Springs has recently expanded into more "wilderness" experiences.

Naturally, the hotel is being sued. From the Colorado Springs Independent:

The posh resort certainly did deliver on that promise in October 2019 when a Broadmoor guide leading three couples on a 2½-hour morning hike got lost and then allegedly abandoned them as the sun set and temperatures dropped.

The party was located by El Paso County Search and Rescue (SAR) teams at midnight — some 14 hours after the hike began. They then had to hike another six hours to a trailhead before returning to the The Broadmoor hotel.

Now, one of those couples, Victor and Annamaria Mitchell, has filed a lawsuit against The Broadmoor and Emerald Valley Ranch, alleging negligence, negligent supervision of the guide by the two entities, and “premises liability for breach of duty to exercise reasonable care to protect guests from danger.”

The suit claims that toward sundown, the guide, who had his own food and water,  "took off running and left the Mitchell’s [sic] and the other three couples behind, lost and stranded in the unfamiliar wilderness."

A "three-hour tour." This could be the plot of a long-running TV show. 

UPDATE Jan. 12, 2022: The hotel paid unspecified damages.  How much is diarrhea worth in court?

On the Perils of Navigation with a Small Screen

Oil pan cracked, the bus sits on Coffee Pot Road. (Photo: Garfield County Sheriff)

People in Colorado are having a good laugh over the hapless Greyhound bus driver who took his passengers onto a rough Forest Service road, following some app that was supposed to route him around the part of Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon that is currently closed due to mudslides.

Meanwhile, the state highway department  supposedly prevailed on Google Maps and Apple Maps to mark Independence Pass (Colorado 82) as "closed," which led to a lot of the Denver-based media saying it was closed "due to mudslides."

Not true — the closure was to keep oversize vehicles off the road. There is signage, but when people who don't know the road try to use it as a detour, inevitably some big motor home or tractor-trailer rig ends up stuck.

I am happy to let Siri on my iPhone guide me around a city, but the small screens just don't do the job when you need to orient yourself in a large area. Nothing — so far — beats a big paper map that lets you see the relationships of Place A, Place B, and Where You Are Now.

Last Friday, M. and I were driving down a long gravel road homeward-bound from mushroom hunting. Below us, a car with two kayaks on the roof pulled out from a popular creekside parking spot, and the driver turned left, uphill. As we came past, she waved. We stopped.

"Can you tell me where the campground is?" she asked, holding up her cellphone.

I blanked for a moment. "There is no developed campground up here," I said.

 "I mean the _______ Creek Campground," she said. "We made a reservation there."

"Oh," I replied, "You passed that about six miles back."

(True, the Forest Service signage there could be better. It is easy to miss the turn-off to this little public campground if you mistake it for a private driveway — you have to pass a small private campground and a couple of houses on the way in.)

She turned around and followed us, over washboard and potholes and cattle guards, until we passed the turn-off, when M. rolled down her window and made vigorous pointing gestures to the right. The would-be campers had only lost about 45 minutes wandering around and then being re-directed.

• I suspect that if she had zoomed in far enough to see the forest roads on her map, then her posiition and the campground would not be on the screen at the same time, making it hard to see their relationship.

If she backed out her view enough to see the campground (if it was on the map), she probably could not see how to get there.

• I did not know that that small campground was now in the Rocky Mountain Recreation Company reservation system. Makes sense though.

• Where they were going to use those kayaks I do not know.

UPDATE: As of Tuesday, August 10,  the state highway department was still feuding with Google Maps. Good luck with that.

Turds, Trash, and Tire Tracks: The Car-Camping Pendulum Swings Again

1925 Ford Model T touring car (Wikipedia).

A century ago, our national forests had a problem. Behind the wheels of their Ford Model T's and other cars, Americans re-discovered camping. Soon over-used favorite camping areas were littered with trash, human waste, multple firepits, unauthorized roads, and all the other bad effects.

The US Forest Service was fifteen years old and trying to get a handle on "scientific" forest management, firefighting, and grazing management. It was part of the Department of Agriculture. ("We're tree-farmers," an old-school district ranger once told me.)

Recreation management was not on their to-do list. That was the National Park Service's job—different agency, different department—the Interior Department. 

Davenport Campground, 1920s, San Isabel National Forest,
southern Colorado, designed by Arthur Carhart as one
of the first automobile campgrounds.

The Model-T generation changed all that, driving and camping everyplace instead of taking the train and shuttling to a big resort hotel like the Old Faithful Inn.

By the early 1920s the Forest Service hired landscape architect (and wilderness advocate) Arthur Carhart to figure how to manage these automobile recreationists.

For more on Carhart's influence on southern Colorado, start here: "Looking for Squirrel Creek Lodge, Part 1."

The Forest Service built campgrounds up through the 1960s and 1970s, but the 1980s — the Reagan years — saw the pendulum swing the other. A couple of Carhart's recreational areas near me were closed in the early 1980s "due to lack of funding for maintenance." In the 1980s and 1990s, local Forest Service managers sang the praises of "dispersed camping." 

(But Daveport Campground, pictured above, was re-built in the early 2000s to re-create its 1920s appearance. Retro-camping with federal dollars — who knew?)

Everything Old Is New Again, Including Turds and Trash

Some people blame the COVID pandemic. I don't know, but suddenly car-camping (and hiking) is really popular. Some headlines:

"Nature 'more important than ever during lockdown'"

More than 40% of people say nature, wildlife and visiting local green spaces have been even more important to their wellbeing since the coronavirus restrictions began.

"Colorado public land managers rely on education, then enforcement to deal with a crush of long-term campers"

Closing heavily used campsites is public lands “triage” as Forest Service and local officials struggle to protect natural resources from a growing wave of backcountry campers and explorers this summer.

"Consultants present potential solutions to mitigate overcrowding issues at Quandary Peak and nearby trailheads"

As events were canceled last summer due to the COVID-19 pandemic, other activities — like hiking Quandary Peak, McCullough Gulch and Blue Lakes trails — skyrocketed in popularity. The influx of visitors to these areas last summer caused a barrage of issues like speeding, congestion, lack of parking and safety concerns

"Reservations will be required for Brainard Lake, Mount Evans beginning in June"

Some areas of Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests that allowed “dispersed” camping will be converted to day-use only

"Which Public Lands Are Right for You?"

Your bucket list should go beyond national parks. This decision tree will help you find lesser known locations with half the crowds. [Also more Instagrammable.—CSC]

Even if it is true that headliner national parks (like Great Smoky Mountains and Grand Canyon) saw fewer visitors due to COVID-related shut-downs, camping on close-in public lands has exploded.  Here in Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park visitation is up 44 percent over ten years, and the NPS wants a reservation system permanently. Not everyone likes that idea.

Suddenly, that loosely managed "dispersed camping" is being managed, heavily. There is a new term: "designated dispersed."

 
"Managed Designated Dispersed Camping Begins on South Platte Ranger District"

Rocky Mountain Recreation will begin managing 99 designated dispersed camp sites on the South Platte Ranger District portion of Rampart Range Road starting Friday, May 21. Each campsite is numbered, and designated parking areas are marked. Thirty of the campsites are available for reservation through recreation.gov and 69 sites are first come, first serve. Campers will be issued a tag to hang in their vehicle. Reserved sites will have a “Reservation” card posted at the campsite with the name of the visitor.

 On the Pike and San Isabel National Forests, the popular Rampart Range dispersed camping area near Woodland Park now has a complicated map. (Facebook link here.)

In the long run, maybe the USFS just needs more developed campsites, with regular maintenance, campground hosts, the whole business — or else a concessionaire to run them.

Blog Stew — Best Eaten in Your Sleeping Bag

 

• Now it will be CabelasBassProShopsSportsmansWarehouse.  There is an interesting angle as to what happens to the Remington firearms brand in this merger. Maybe it becomes a sort of house brand?

• An obviously incomplete "history of sleeping bags." But check out the two men repairing their reindeer skin (?) bags. Those are Teddy Evans and Tom Crean, members  of Robert Scott's last expedition to the South Pole. They survived because they were cut from the final group that "dashed" for the Pole.

• There is a new herd of genetically pure (more or less) bison in Bent County, part of Colorado State University's research herd. The site is the 25,000-acre Heartland Ranch Nature Preserve.

To Light a Camp Stove

Jørgen Brønlund was a Greenland-born Inuit and the last to die.

If you read this blog, you probably have read Jack London's famous short story about an Yukon prospector set in the early 1900s, "To Build a Fire." (Actually there were two versions with diffrent endings. The second one is the one most of us have read.)

Only a few years later, the last survivor of a 1906–1908 expedition, sponsored by the Danish government and known formally as the Denmark Expedition to Greenland's Northeast Coast, died after failing to light his kerosene (?) stove in a freezing cave.

His body and his diary were found in 1908, but the stove itself was recovered only in 1973. 

A possible reconstruction of his last hours suggest he might have tried to use a diary page — and other stuff — to help pre-heat the fuel.

Fishing License Sales Rise as SWA Rule Begins

Front page photo from the Wet Mountain Tribune, July 16, 2020.

I was talking with a game warden from one of the mountain counties three days ago during one my "wildlife transport" runs, and I asked her how the new requirement — that you must have a hunting or fishing license to use state wildlife areas — was working out for field officers like herself.

Right now, we are just trying to educate people, she said, adding that people would get in her face and yell about "I pay taxes!"

Which  goes to show how ignorant they are. You could pay $10,000 a year in state income tax, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife would get little if any of it. (But do buy lottery tickets, because some of that money goes to state parks.)

Click to enlarge (San Bernardino
Natonal Forest on Facebook)

Meanwhile, she said, virtually every campsite in her area, developed or not, was in use. Maybe it's time for people to try this creative approach, pioneered in California--see graphic at right.

1. Not all state wildlife areas (SWAs) are owned by the state.  See the lake in the photo above? It's owned by a Cañon City-based irrigation company. I know this because I used to be a shareholder and watered our trees and gardens with that water. But I could safely bet that 95-percent of visitors (iincuding locals) think it's "public land," whereas in fact CPW leases fishing rights, including boating-while-fishing, and does permit cmaping. There are other SWAs that also are leased, although many are owned outright.

Colorado’s SWAs are acquired with license dollars from hunters and anglers – and are managed with that funding today – primarily to restore, conserve, manage and enhance wildlife and wildlife habitat.

2. CPW gets virtually no state income tax money. That is actually a good thing, because then legislators cannot raid CPW's budget to pay for their more-favored projects. Click here for pie charts of Wildlife and Parks funding.

Notice that the wildlife side is 68-percent funded by license sales and 19-percent by federal grants. ("Severance tax" refers to taxes on mining, oil, etc. not personal taxes.)

3. The federal grants are tied to hunting/fishing license sales. I have heard people say this is Donald Trump's fault. No, it is Franklin Roosevelt's "fault," since the controlling Pittman-Roberton Act was passed in 1937. The act directs money from federal taxes on firearms and ammunition down to the states with these guidelines:

States must fulfill certain requirements to use the money apportioned to them. None of the money from their hunting license sales may be used by anyone other than the states' own fish and game departments. Plans for what to do with the money must be submitted to and approved by the Secretary of the Interior. Acceptable options include research, surveys, management of wildlife and/or habitat, and acquisition or lease of land. Once a plan has been approved, the state must pay the full cost and is later reimbursed for up to 75% of that cost through the funds generated by the Pittman–Robertson Act.The 25% of the cost that the state must pay generally comes from its hunting license sales.If, for whatever reason, any of the federal money does not get spent, after two years that money is then reallocated to the Migratory Bird Conservation Act.

Some people say that Pittman-Robertson should be extended to hiking books, backcountry skis, backpacking gear, etc. An interesting thought.

Sanchez Reservoir is near the town
of San Luis in the southern San Luis Valley

4. Why is this access issue coming up now? I  will just quote a recent CPW news release:

Across the state, CPW has seen increasing use of state wildlife areas inconsistent with their purpose. A good example is camping, including people taking up temporary residence in SWAs. We’ve also seen vehicular use on big game winter ranges, pressure from hikers, maintenance issues, trash, vandalism and other uses detrimental to wildlife and wildlife-related uses.

5. So why can't I buy a "hiking pass" or a "wildlife-watching pass? See #3. A "hiking pass" would not bring in any of the federal grant money that state wildlife management depends on. CPW tried something like that in the recent past, but got into a hassle with the federal government:

Several years ago, the General Assembly voted to require all users of SWAs to purchase a state Wildlife Habitat Stamp as a way to generate conservation funding.

It failed for a couple reasons. First, only hunters or anglers complied, for the most part. Those who only hike or watch wildlife or camp didn’t bother to buy the stamp.

Second, funding for SWAs actually fell because federal officials ruled the Habitat Stamp was classified as “program income” and it ended up decreasing our federal grant money by the same amount we were able to bring in.

6. Suprise, fishing license sales are rising! According to Colorado Public Radio. "Colorado Parks and Wildlife has issued nearly 90,000 more annual fishing licenses so far this year compared to the same period in 2019." They say a lot of that is people getting outdoors during the pandemic, but also mention the new regulation. Many of these anglers are new to the sport — or at least new to it in Colorado.

Blog Stew by Reservation Only

Too many things to blog about. So try some blog stew with these ingredients! 

• Will you find a campsite? Beginning in 2020 all Colorado state park campsites will be available by reservation only. And yes, I think that's progress.

Log in from your computer or smartphone or by calling 800-244-5613.

Bigfoot, however, cannot be reserved. You just have to be there.

• PEEGS!! I can say that they are already here, although not in large numbers.

Feral pigs cause an estimated $1.5 billion in damage each year, especially to crops. Now concern is mounting they could be at the doorstep in parts of the Mountain West.

The pigs — which an expert at the USDA has called "one of the most destructive and formidable invasive species in the United States" — could come across the Canadian border into Montana, or traipse into Colorado from the feral pig stronghold of Texas.

Once Texas was the Comanche Empire. Now it's the Pig Stronghold. Progress?  To continue:

In Canada, where feral pigs are now firmly established in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, a University of Saskatchewan researcher described wild pigs as "ecological train wrecks." A recent study conducted in Mississippi found that species diversity is 26% less in forests that have been invaded by swine.

Apparently some landowners welcome them, maybe so that they can charge hunters a trespass fee. 

Where have I seen them? Around Pueblo SWA, just a couple of times.

• And then there is this: People who spend more time outdoors lead more fulfilling lives, new research shows."

Those who got in two to three hours in nature[a week] were about 20% more likely to report high overall satisfaction with their lives than those who spent no time outdoors at all. The benefits to physical health were even greater, with those who met the outdoors benchmark being 60% more likely to report being in good health than their cooped-in counterparts.

You know what to do.

The Dawn Cow-Rus

There was a herd of Black Angus cattle near our campground last weekend at State Forest State Park — I will be writing more about the park itself soon.

Tuesday morning they were right down around the trailer, noisily crunching grass, bumping the trailer (just once), and mooing, led by the cow-municator in chief.

He is not in this video, but there was a white Shorthorn* bull in with the Black Angus cows. That is one of his offspring there, I suppose.

Now I am thinking about a bovine smartphone app, like this one.

*I may have cousins in the cattle business, but I make no claims to expertise myself. But I think he was a Shorthorn, with the jowly face.

Whatever Happened to Pickup Campers?

A couple of weeks ago, my friend R. and I were talking about trailers and RVs and such (maybe because he had recently gotten a new-used boat), and we both had the same question: When did pickup campers go away?

They were the inexpensive gateway to car-camping if you did not want to sleep in a tent due to weather or (conceivably) bears. 

"And you could tow your boat behind it," R. pointed out.

We both remembered how when we were kids, a lot of the dads in the Boy Scout troop or whatever showed up with campers mounted on their 1960s or 1970s or maybe early 1980s pickups. 

Sometimes the camper was slid out of the pickup bed in the off-season and left sitting on sawhorses in the side yard, while the pickup was used for other hauling or just as a daily driver.

Was this just another example of American Feature Creep? More and more gadgets, more and more dollars? Did Plain Jane pickup campers not offer enough profit margin compared to motorhomes and camping trailers? I suspect that they did not.

I still see a few, often with pop-tops, which helps with the wind resistance out on the highway, but nothing like during my childhood.

Our First Trip to Trinidad Lake State Park

Part of Carpios Ridge Campground from an overlook.

As I turned into the Carpios Ridge Campground at Trinidad Lake State Park, pulling the little pop-up trailer, I saw this tall building with a bright red-orange metal roof.

"That must be the visitor center," I said to M. But I was so wrong. It was the "camper services" building — toilets, plus coin-operated showers, laundry room, and vending machines. The actual visitor center was more modest.

By happenstance, the first weekend of June found us holding reservations for the dogs at the boarding kennel, but our original planned destination was impossible. What to do? A lot of the high country was still snowy and/or in the middle of the Big Melt, so we looked lower down.

A view from our campsite. The forest here is mostly piñon-juniper.

Trinidad Lake SP was not too far away, and thanks to our volunteer work, we had a brand-new hang tag for the Jeep that would give us free park admission — we still had to pay for the campsites. I went online to check, and there were two left, so I grabbed one. (All these campsites are by reservation only.)

The Purgatory River was dammed to create the lake in 1979, making it slightly younger than Pueblo Reservoir.  The lake's level fluctuates, but it is around 800 acres.

Creating the lake drowned some former "coal camps," but you can see visit Cokedale at the park's west end, with its long row of former coke ovens aging under the Colorado sun — when they were working, that little valley must have filled with choking smoke.

One morning I went down to fish before breakfast, and I admit to being skunked—I saw a couple of fish, but they rejected my lures. Some anglers in boats were not doing well either, but I saw one hooked by a fisherman on the shore.

Muddy water flowing into the lake.

When I don't know a lake, my default strategy is to fish the inlet. We went up there later, but the muddy water of "the Purg" was flowing in big-time out of the Culebra Range. So I switched to hiking and geocaching — CPW staff have placed some excellent caches, as well as those left by other geocachers.

The riparian zone meets the P-J in Long's Canyon.

The best hike is Long's Canyon, about a three-mile round trip, because it is away from roads and follows a creek and riparian area that offers the best birding and wildlife-viewing opportunities. There are even some permanent blinds.

It also includes a geological feature, the KT (KPg) Boundary, as described in "An Earth-Shattering Kaboom at Trinidad Lake State Park."

If all this is not enough, you are only about five miles from the Corazon de Trinidad National Historic Area.

I Was Here, Where Were You?

Encountered in the Wet Mountains

I feel like I have been somewhere, that is for sure. I was on-deadline the second half of August, and while the grass grew and the dog's walks were a little shorter than they should have been, I bashed out the 8,000 words required. But I missed blogging.

Now I am at a Secret Location in far-northern New Mexico, clearing out my emails. It's nice when Secret Locations have decent wifi.

Meanwhile: here are a few things of interest.

• How they used to burn the prairies. Not just the prairies. As I ride Amtrak through the Midwest, I often mentally conjure a dry, breezy day and a line of people with drip torches. (Link goes to video.) I mean, there used to be buffalo in Kentucky.

• I remember my dad walking through our garden in the Black Hills, pulling the husks off ears of corn, and tossing them away with a curse if they were infected with smut. Sadly, he did not know that the Ancestral Puebloans (and the Aztecs) considered Ustilago maydis to be a delicacy and derived nutritional benefits from eating it!

• From Women's Outdoor News, some tips and hacks for better family car-camping. With S'mores, so you know it is family-friendly.

It's Time to Fire Up the Coleman Lantern

Last weekend at Sylvan Lake State Park, the solar lantern just was not bright enough for both M's and my reading, so I fired up the single-mantle Coleman lantern to illuminate the trailer.

Coast to coast, this lantern has illuminated many campsites. It heated my old van on waterfowling trips in the San Luis Valley as the temperature plunged well below freezing.

As best I recall, it came from the garage of an old smelter worker's cottage on Cañon City's unfashionable south side, after a co-worker rented it.

(I lived next door. Those were not shining times.)

With new washers in the pump and a new globe, it was back in operation.

The special pungency of Coleman's blended white gas, poured through the distinctive filter funnel — bright red, so you don't leave it sitting on the picnic table, as I almost did last Sunday.

You spin the cleaning lever, pump it, light it, pump some more, open the gas — OK, I admit it sounds like starting a Model T Ford or something like that.

Apparently an ad for the British market.
I never heard of the "Empire" model.

Maybe it's that early-20th-century technology. But it works — and you don't send empty gas canisters to the landfill or let them pile up at Base Camp for someone else to deal with.
Some people say Aladdin lanterns are quieter and better, but growing up in Colorado and South Dakota, I never saw one.

Back in the 1980s when I occasionally served as a camp hand for a local outfitter in return for free outdoor adventure, I heard this story from one of the clients.

He had been looking for a little store that existed or was supposed to exist near Red Wing in Huerfano County because we were low on Coleman mantles, the original kind that you tie on with cold-numbed fingers.
 
As the client stood by his truck, he recalled, this ranchman rode up on horseback. When he learned what the problem was, the horseman pulled out his billfold, opened it, and extracted a mantle, which he handed down, saying, "Some fellows carry condoms, but up here, these are more valuable."

Or maybe he said "carry rubbers." Anyhow, if it's not true, it should be.

On Attracting and Repelling Bears

• Illegal campsites are usually trashy. Yes, that's a stereotype, but stereotypes have to come from somewhere. And when you have trash in the Colorado mountains, you have bears. Hungry bears. Bears that don't want you to get between them and the food.

• Man gives bear the angry-hominid treatment in a Swedish forest  (You Tube).

I have been told that Eurasian brown bears, Ursos arctos artos, like North American black bears, are generally shy of people. Is that because they both primarily live in forests? (But some live on steppes, I know.)

Likewise, some argue that grizzly bears, Ursos artocs horribilis, which were originally found on the prairies (although often in riparian corridors) and polar bears have a "take no prisoners" attitude because they have nowhere to seek refugre if, for instance, their cubs are threatened.

Evolution or adaptation to pressure from humans?

Black bear mamas — and I have seen this a couple of times — will send the cubs up a tree and run away themselves. Whether that is for self-preservation or to lure away the perceived threatening agent, I will let someone else decide.

• If you have read this far, you too are fascinated by people's complex relationship with bears. One takeaway from David Rockwell's Giving Voice to Bear — which includes some northern European as well as North American cultural material — is that bear-hunting must be the most ritualized of all hunting.

More than any other animal, Bear is not only quarry but teacher. A great deal of "bear magic" is not just hunting stuff but herbalism. People say that they or their ancestors learned how to cure from watching bears — or from getting the power of bears.

But can bears teach them how to live in the woods?

"Someone" Was Living in that Hole

Nine years after the big fire.

Monday we hiked one of our favorite old trails, severely burned over in 2005. That fire was followed by a flash flood the same summer, wiping out parts of the trail, and then came an influx of invasive weeds. The weeds are not so bad now — there is more grass — but you still have to pick your way over trunks of dead trees that have toppled in the intervening years.

More linkage

M. is enough of an animist that of course she would say, "Someone is living in that hole," as opposed to "an animal of some sort." Isn't an animal "someone"? (It's the second item under "Sept. 15.")

Recent severe forest fires in Colorado are not a "departure from the norm," say University of Colorado researchers. " Modern fires in these Front Range forests are not radically different from the fire severity of the region prior to any effects of fire suppression." In other words, we are still feeling the effects of the 1910–present regime of fire suppression.

Bicycle commuting supposedly skyrockets — but in Colorado Springs, it's all about fun, not about going to work. "The Springs is probably the best city along the Front Range for mountain biking," said Tim Halfpop, manager of Old Town Bike Shop on South Tejon Street. "But we're the worst for road riding and getting around town."

The founder of Wiggy's, the low-profile but respected outdoor gear maker in Grand Junction, is promoting lamilite, a continuous-fiber synthelic insulation. I am just re-reading Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, set in the mid-1930s during the Spanish Civil War, in which the American protagonist, Robert Jordan, extolls the virtues of his eiderdown-insulated "robe," for which he paid $65 — more than $1,000 today, according to one calculator. Makes Wiggy's bags look like a deal.

Rich French diners are still chowing down on endangered birds. It's tradition, you see. "Captured Ortolans are kept and fed heavily for at least three weeks until they resemble a small fat ball. Once they reach a specific weight, the unfortunate birds are drowned in a French liqueur called Armagnac, before being prepared or sold. In France, the price for such a peculiar 'delicacy' easily reaches 150 Euros ($189 US)."

Did I mention that ze artiste Christo has admitted that his plan to hang plastic panels over the Arkansas River is "at a standstill"? No doubt some art auction house will sell copies of his legal filings. It's all conceptual, you see.

Looking for Squirrel Creek Lodge - Part 4

Missouri-Pacific Railroad tourism brochure, 1927

Part 1: Looking for Colorado 76

Part 2: Davenport, the "Retro" Campground

Part 3: Erasing Arthur Carhart's Vision

Selling the San Isabel to Out-of-State Visitors

The first post in this series described Arthur Carhart's vision for scenic roads connecting campgrounds, picnic grounds, and private resorts in the Wet Mountains, the "cradle of car camping."

But what about out-of-state visitors? From the designation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 into the 20th century, many North American tourists arrived at the nearest railway station to their destinations.

Then they might walk or take a coach to the nearest hotel. Some were grand, like the Banff Springs Hotel, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1888–89. From the hotel, they could self-guided or escorted tours, such as by stagecoach from Livingston, Mont., into Yellowstone under U. S. Army escort (the Army patrolled the park until 1918, when the National Park Service took over). 

The Baver Li Lodge on Highway 165, late 1920s or 1930s.

The Missouri Pacific RR operated a route west from St. Louis to Pueblo, Cañon City, and on to Salt Lake City via Grand Junction. Eager to attract passengers, it provided this 16-page brochure about the San Isabel National Forest, "Colorado's newest playground." 

According to the grandson of the Baver Li Lodge's founders, the Missouri Pacific tried to buy the lodge (built in 1927) in 1929, but his grandparents would not sell. (It closed as a lodge in the 1960s but is still in the family.)

The brochure offered numerous one, two, and three-day automobile tours, for example, this one booked through the San Isabel Forest Tours Co. of Pueblo: 

"No. 1" — One day. Includes automobile transportation and mid-day dinner. From Pueblo via Rye and Willow Creek Camp to Squirrel Creek Community House [Lodge] for dinner; returning through Squirrel Creek Canyon [Colorado 76], Pine Drive to Pueblo. Fare, $8.00 per person.

Another day trip went from Pueblo to Wetmore and Westcliffe, included a meal at the Alpine Lodge, and returned through the Arkansas River canyon and Cañon City to Pueblo. When you consider that was almost all on gravel roads with a maximum possible top speed of perhaps 40–45 mph, it would have been a long day's car ride for your $10.50 fare.

In today's dollars, that trip cost $142 per person, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics site. A cabin plus meals (fireplace heat, no plumbing) at the Baver Li Lodge cost $40–$50 in today's money (I would book one, definitely). I have not yet seen a menu for the Squirrel Creek Lodge, but I suspect that it featured fried chicken, since the archaeologists identified one foundation nearby as the chicken house.

The Missouri Pacific's brochure gushed about "Mountain Trout," "History and Romance," "The Wooliness of the West," "Altruistic Purposes" ("exorbitant charges for accommodation and services will not be countenanced"), "Scenic Grandeur," and "Special Vacation Summer Fares," among other headings.

One section, "The Hospitality of Colorado, reads as follows:

The spirit of wholesome friendliness is one of the refreshing pleasure to be anticipated in a visit to Colorado, and particularly to the San Isabel. The inhabitants of this country seem to be imbued with the bigness of their environs and manifest a sincere cordiality. In Colorado, all class distinction seems to be neutralized.

I wonder what areas we were being compared to.

To be continued at some point.

Looking for Squirrel Creek Lodge - Part 3

It's not just an incinerator, it is a "Kernerator,"
by the Kern Incinerator Co. of Milwaukee.

Part 1: Looking for Colorado 76

Part 2: Davenport, the "Retro" Campground

The US Forest Service's remaking of Davenport Campground into something like Arthur Carhart's original vision, as mentioned in my last post, was praise-worthy.

But does it make up for the Service's obliteration of much of Carhart's original vision for recreational faciltiies? Not really.

Under the supervision of Carhart and his former landscape-architecture professor-turned-business partner, Frank Culley, Boy Scouts and other workers built facilities on South Hardscrabble Creek — the Florence Picnic Ground — and on North Creek, just north of Beulah. Another picnic ground was built at Smith Creek, in Hardscrabble Canyon above Wetmore.

In the late 1970s, the Forest Service demolished them all. According to a friend of mine, a life-long area resident who attended a public meeting about this decision held in Beulah, the USFS representative claimed these facilities were "inacessible" and "rarely visited."

Another friend, a Westcliffe resident, said he had heard they were demolished due to vandalism problems. In any case, the Forest Service no longer wanted to maintain them.

Instead of picnic tables, trash receptacles, outhouses, etc., the new model was "dispersed camping." Tack up a sign saying "Pack in it, pack it out," and all is good. Of course, no one packs out human shit.

A lot of this dispersed camping takes place in very locations where Carhart laid out picnic and campgrounds!

We have come full circle back to 1919, except that the standard of environmental education among forest visitors is a little higher. Sometimes.

The incinerator built to burn trash from the 1920s Squirrel Creek campsites slowly crumbles away.

Arthur Carhart's contract with the Forest Service lasted only from 1920–1922, after which time funding was . . . lost. He went into private practice and did other interesting work, but eventually became a full-time writer of fiction and nonfiction with outdoor themes.

Just tonight, I heard a professional chef praising his The Outdoorsman's Cookbook. Of course, this praise was from a guy who has walked the Squirrel Creek Trail himself.

Until recently, recreation was not truly a Forest Service priority — at least that was my perception. As a specialty, it lacked prestige. From its early twentieth-century creation onward, the Forest Service was all about timber management — and also grazing management — and firefighting to protect those two priorities.

I remember Dad when he was a USFS district ranger in the Black Hills saying (without irony), "We're tree farmers."

As opposed, it did not need to be said, to the pressed-pants-wearing, somewhat sissified  (Dept. of the Interior) National Park Service rangers who led tourists around by the hand, (Dept. of Agriculture) Forest Service rangers did real stuff with horses, axes, increment borers, cruising rods, and log-scaling rules.

Recreation on his district was handled by one man, a "recreation guard," who lived in a cabin off away from the work center and had a crew of seasonal workers in the summer.

People who rose in the hierarchy came from a forestry background, not a recreation background, although that has changed some in the last generation.

But thanks to the San Isabel Public Recreation Association and Carhart's and Culley's work, private interests began pushing tourism in and around the San Isabel National Forest, something I will look at next.

Next: Part 4 — Selling the San Isabel to Out-of-State Visitors

Looking for Squirrel Creek Lodge, Part 2

Part 1, "Looking for Colorado 76"

Here are the 1947 flood waters one drainage north of Davenport Campground, near Baver Li Lodge.

What was then described as the Davenport Camp-Picnic Ground evidently survived the flood of 1947, which was most destructive in the narrow canyon of Squirrel Creek.

This photo is probably Davenport Picnic Ground in the 1920s, as the valley here is wider.

1920s-style cooking shelter recreated at today's Davenport Campground.

In 2004, Forest Service archaeologists Steve Seguin and Jennifer Cordova, together with historian Jack McCrory, prepared documentation to place the "Squirrel Creek Recreational Unit, " otherwise known as the "cradle of car camping," on the National Register of Historic Places.

Bases of guard rail posts at scenic overlook
on what was Colorado 76.

They listed all manner of remaining relics, down to guard rails and sign posts, but did not (so far as I noticed) say anything about a telephone line. But I found two mentions of a line that connected the Baver Li Lodge (of which more later), built in 1927, to the town of Beulah, running mostly along Squirrel Creek and the now-vanished Colorado Highway 76.

According to a 1967 article in the Pueblo Chieftain, summarized on this site,

The telephone line had been installed through Squirrel Creek by the Forest Service in the 1920’s. As their private line, Tena and later, grandson, Chuck, had to maintain it. Every spring one of them would ‘walk the line’ to find where the breaks had occurred and repair them. One year the Boy Scouts from Rye came up to help.

A short historical article about Beulah's Pine Drive Telephone Co. mentions it too:

One notable line was the one maintained from Baver-Li Lodge in Ophir Creek down Squirrel Creek. It took great fortitude to maintain that line after the ‘47 flood!

In 2009, as part of the U.S. Forest Service's centennial, Davenport was remodeled into a "retro" tents-only campground—and it remains popular.

You have to drive down into the campground (trailers and motorhomes should park above the entrance, in the Second MaceTrailhead parking lot) to see the interpretive signs.

There is nothing about Arthur Carhart's vision for forest recreation in any historical marker on any highway at this time. More signage, including a panel about him, has been proposed for the junction of Colorado 67 and 96 in Wetmore, part of the Frontier Pathways Scenic and Historic Byway.

Next, Part 3:Erasing Arthur Carhart's Vision

Looking for Squirrel Creek Lodge, Part 1

It is 1923, you are suffering the summer heat in Pueblo, Colorado, and you want to go car-camping up in the cooler Wet Mountains. So you load your blankets, quilts, and canvas tent in and on the Ford, pack some flour and bacon, maybe grab a fishing pole, and off you go. You take Colorado State Highway 76 (a gravel road) southwest to the foothills town of Beulah, then stay on 76 as it enters Squirrel Creek Canyon and the San Isabel National Forest.

1948 San Isabel National Forest map shows Colorado 76 coming southwest from Pueblo.

Bridge dated 1916 on Squirrel Creek Road, formerly Colorado 76, in Beulah.

You know this part of the road is new — in fact,  it was laid out by Forest Service landscape architect Arthur Carhart. His former professor from Iowa State, Frank Culley, was involved too on the project to design numerous campsites along the road, all with hand pumps, designated concrete garbage pits, and "sanitaries" (outdoor toilets) — all a response to the trash and piles of human waste that popular campsites had been attracting.

The first picnic and camping sites there had been designated in 1919. That was just five years after the southern Colorado Coalfield War that culminated in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. It was two years after the Russian Revolution, which had segued into civil war, and one year after the end of World War One.

Private money — the San Isabel Public Recreation Association (SIPRA) — helped pay for the first improvements. Colorado Fuel & Iron, southern Colorado's industrial behemoth, with its coal mines, coke ovens, and steel mill, was the largest contributor. Wholesome outdoor recreation will lure its workers away from Red agitators.

Carhart writes,

There is a chance in this sort of [forest] camp to teach better Americanization of the people of foreign blood now living in our midst . . . these men will become better citizens and far less open to insidious suggestions of the radical agitator to strike at this land they have come to know and love.*

Enjoying one of the new campgrounds on Squirrel Creek. Woman takes photo of men by fireplace. Check gen-u-wine ten-gallon hat on man in foreground.

The campgrounds are wildly popular. On summer weekend days, as many as 700 cars pass up Colorado 76, which connects to Colorado 165, the north-south road through the Wet Mountains.

Many people stay or take meals at the privately operated Squirrel Creek Lodge, a two-story log structure in the center of the camping area. It stays popular until the World War II era, when it faces competition from the San Isabel lodge (which also began as a SIPRA project).

But Carhart's cool, winding creekside road is vulnerable. Rockslides menace it from the slopes above, and in 1947, a major flash flood rips down the narrow canyon, destroying all the little bridges, tearing out campsites, and wrecking many parts of the road.

Squirrel Creek Lodge: A central room with two wings, front porch on the left.
Dinner • Refreshment • Lodging • Souvenirs.

Click to enlarge for photos of original lodge.

The lodge falls into disuse and eventually burns in a 1979 forest fire.

The state builds a new highway from Beulah to Colorado 165. Formerly the Twelve-mile Road, it is now designated Colorado 78, and it  takes a higher route up a ridge.

Its last nine miles are still gravel today, and according to a friend on the Custer County Road & Bridge Dept., are the last gravel stretch of a state highway. (Many state highways around here were gravel roads into the 1960s, when there was a big push to pave them.)

Mentally remove the young trees along the trail, and there is the old Colorado 76.

Hiker at mortared wall that marked a scenic pull-off on Colorado 76.

Colorado 76 devolves into a Forest Service trail — one that oddly features mortared-stone retaining walls, log guard rails, and steel culverts. It passes the ruined campsites, where campers improvise new fire pits, and the ruins of the Squirrel Creek Lodge and its associated cabins.

You, meanwhile . . . Dad is in the steelworkers' union and has a new car with a powerful V-8 engine. Mom doesn't wear those 1920s cloche hats anymore.

You can go anywhere — Yellowstone, Banff . . . no more chugging up Squirrel Creek Hill with the Model T threatening to boil over.

Remember those days when you were younger, when the Squirrel Creek campground was the oldest auto campground in the national forest?

Next: Part 2: Davenport, the "Retro" Campground

*Tom Wolf, Arthur Carhart: Wilderness Prophet  (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008), 55.

Testing Tipis in the Jet Stream

16-man tipi and woodpile (Photo: Jamie Marchbank)

The sociologist of religion Peter Berger is known for his 1967 book The Sacred Canopy. I was thinking about it Friday night as I lay in the snow just outside the Eagles Nest Wilderness, as the Jet Stream ripped across the Gore Range.

Berger writes, "The sheltering quality of social order becomes especially evident if one looks at the marginal situations in the life of the individual, that is, at situations in which he is driven close to or beyond the boundaries of the order that determines his routine, everyday existence"

Such as winter camping, for example — definitely not part of my everyday existence.

Ira Chernus, a religious-studies professor at CU-Boulder, summarizes what Berger means by "the canopy":

What we want more than anything else, according to this sociological view, is to be in balance--to have a permanent stable order in our lives, so that we can predict both the environment and the responses to it that we and others around us will choose. Society's main project is to create this sense of stable predictable order and to make all of us believe in it, although in fact it is always a false illusion.

We want a stable order, yes, which means that the tent stays up. But in one sudden 60 mph-or-higher blast, the high-tech "16-man" cooking/dining tipi, centerpiece of the annual Colorado Kifaru Winter Rendezvous, has simply vanished — and I lay in my sleeping bag, looking up at an angry murky sky, semi-illuminated by the Moon.

The canopy, sacred or otherwise, was gone. Stability was a false illusion.

Up, out of the sleeping bag, pulling on my boots, I made sure that the fabric had not snagged on the wood-burning stove — now tipped on its side — that still held a few embers.

Plan A, check with Kevin, my near neighbor, who had an "8-man" tipi set up. I turned that way and—where was the tipi? It was down too, and its stove had tumbled a pot of melting snow onto his sleeping bag. Luckily, the temperature was only slightly below freezing, and so Kevin had covered his sleeping bag with a bivvy sack, zipped it up, and planned to deal with everything in the morning.

Since I had no bivvy sack, my Plan B was to wrap up in the tent fabric like a human tamale and wait out the night. 

Then I saw a head lamp moving over in another direction. Another tent was down. It was Eric's, and he had room, so I traded help in re-rigging his small tipi for shelter space. By shoveling snow around the edges, we cut down on the ground blizzards that were moving through the tent.

Kifaru's tipis should have stood up to that wind, and in fact, not every one of them went down. For the big tent — maybe the others too – I blame the fact that it was erected late in the afternoon, and the snow had not really set up around the long snow pins. We re-did it the next morning, making everything extra-taut and weighting down the edges with snow, and it did fine.

Eric cooking in the snow cave's vestibule.

But Eric had another idea: he had started a snow cave the day before, and on Saturday we spent another hour enlarging it to two-man capacity.

Snow caves are so quiet. You can hear yourself blink.

Blog Stew Chopped with Cheap Knives

¶ Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man comes down firmly in the price-versus-quality debate in regard to knives, axes, and machetes. He and I agree on Mora knives— mine are so old they have wooden handles.

¶ In all the news-media fuss over legalized recreational marijuana use in Colorado, not much is being said about the new rules on farming for hemp for industrial uses. I wonder which will be a bigger story in the long run.

¶ "Man Mistaken for Coyote Killed in Southwest Colo. Hunting Accident," said the headline. How, you wonder? Apparently a case of technology being "smarter" than people. Oh brave new world