Instagram Blamed for "Crystal Mill" Access Closure

The 1892 Crystal "Mill" was actually a powerhouse. (Library of Congress)

 If you live in Colorado, you know this image. As the man quoted says, it's on the wall of every dentist's office. (Except my old dentist, who stuck streamer flies in the ceiling tiles sothat you could contemplate them when the chair reclined.)

What used to be a popular destination is now closed off. It was just too too Instagram-able.  The owner used to charge visitors a $10 fee. Now access is closed, reports the Colorado Sun.

Some of the visitors to the Crystal Mill and Crystal City ghost town area — estimated at thousands a week in the summer season — had started prying off bits of the historic mill. They were carving their names into surrounding trees and spray painting on structures. Some threw a party inside the rickety mill building. One slung a hammock from the side of the mill. Some buzzed drones over the area. One pulled a gun on a Cox employee when asked to pay the $10 access fee.

Marble locals have reported that others went to nearby private historic cabins and walked in on summer residents, thinking the structures were there for more of their backcountry exploration. People relieved themselves outside the cabins after they found they couldn’t wander in and use a toilet.

Marble business owners who run tours to the mill or rent rugged vehicles capable of getting there, blame social media for the influx of ill-intentioned visitors bent on snagging the best selfies with an internationally recognized mining-era structure.

 Find your own damn social media hotspot, OK?

Tarantula Tourism Is Taken, Why not Tumbleweeds?

Migrating tarantua in southern Colorado (12News Denver).

For polar bear tourism, Churchill, Manitoba, is the spot. For grizzly bears, probably Yellowstone. For sandhill cranes, try western Nebraska or the annual festival in Monte Vista, Colorado. For snow geese, it's Lamar, Colorado.

For tarantulas, it will be La Junta, Colorado. The financing is in place.

Adding to the news of the new logo, director Pam Denahy said the board has received $20.000 in a grant from the Colorado Tourism Board, La Junta matched it with $5,000 for an educational campaign on the Tarantula. It would include creating a microsite with the Visit La Junta Site that would focus on inspiring responsible and respectful visitation during the migration season. That includes advice on how to visit the tarantulas and how to leave them alone.

Denahy said that information became much needed. "We even got a call, I think, last summer from a pet shop in Denver saying that people were taking the tarantulas from here and trying to sell them up in Denver," she replied.

 OK, so tarantulas are taken. What about tumbleweeds? The migration takes place in the early winter, and it is "oddly terrifying."

 

Everybody Thinks Something about the Resort-Town Housing Crisis

Victor, Colorado, had lots of houses when it was a mining town.
Not so many second-home owners back in those days.

Mountain and resort-town housing — the lack of it — is lighting up Rocky Mountain news sites. Town councils are suddenly turning nasty and seeing seasonal homeowners as the obstacle to year-around workers finding a place to live. Or they start cracking down on short-term rentals. Breckenridge, for example:

Breckenridge, with its ski slopes reaching into the middle of town, is a short-term rental haven. The town has 3,945 privately owned homes and condos that vacationers can rent. The town council, in an effort town leaders described as a way “to protect our quality of life and the fabric of our community” and “fiercely protect the character of Breckenridge,” on Tuesday unanimously approved a 2,200-property cap on so-called exempt short-term rentals in the town. Those are the homes that are not part of a larger hotel-like complex that offers a staffed front-desk and security. . . . The vacation-rental strategies deployed in Aspen, Breckenridge, Chaffee County, Crested Butte, Eagle County, Grand County, Steamboat Springs, Telluride and  Summit County all differ, but one thing is clear: The largely unfettered growth of short-term rentals in Colorado’s high country is coming to an end.

Hotel owners must like the idea of capping short-term rentals a lot.

I feel like I have been on all sides of this issue. I have sought Colorado small-town housing in situations of "Take it now, it's the best you can get." 

Then not along ago, I was walking down a street in Taos, New Mexico, and recognized a little apartment where as a twenty-something I had a short-term relationship with a woman who lived there. I don't remember how we met or how she supported herself. What I thought instead was, "I bet that's an AirBnB rental now."

Yet my wife and I were staying in an AirBnB rental nearby ourselves! We like to be able to cook our own meals, for one thing. Sneaking an electric hot plate into a motel room gets old.

On the other side, we were short-term rental landlords from 2002 to 2020, when our county briefly shut down all short-term rentals because of the pandemic — just when we had decided to change from a do-it-yourself approach to listing with VRBO. 

When we switched our "guest cabin" from long-term to short-term, we knew we were taking a rental property off the market in an area where rentals are very difficult to find. But there were advantages from our end:

• Short-term renters do less damage. They don't leave junk cars on the property or mysteriously acquire extra dogs.
  
• The cabin's well is a little unreliable. It is easy to call someone to haul water for the cistern for short-term guests, but that would be really expensive to do for long-term renters.
• The short-term approach let us block out times for family and friends and for our own occasional travel. 

Financially, we probably did not do as well, since the business was highly seasonal, but we paid the taxes and insurance and got the income-tax write-off for rental properties. But we could have rented it to that newly hired schoolteacher that you read about in all the news stories, the one who ends up turning down the job because s/he can't find a place to live.

There’s no affordable housing in Mancos. Zero rental units. Nearly no houses on the market. The town’s school district struggles to hire teachers because they can’t find a place to live. It’s the same story with the town government, the hospital and the nursing home.

Maybe if we get the well-situation worked out, we can do that. And new flooring downstairs. Et cetera.

Small towns that want to build municipally funded housing find problems too. Some have to go with geology, others with the construction economy.

Pagosa Springs, for example, has earmarked land for affordable housing but struggled to get the attention of developers. After receiving zero responses to a request to build a dozen units last spring, the town this fall expanded the development to include up to 64 units on three plots of land, offered at little to no cost. It got three responses. 

“These guys are making good money right now building custom homes,” Pagosa Springs councilmember Mat deGraaf said of developers. “If you’ve ever worked in the trades, you make hay when the sun shines. And right now the sun is shining so I don’t fault them.”

So even when towns want to spend money on housing, there can be obstacles.

I don't think it does much good to beat up on that out-of-state person who owns a "Christmas house" in Blue River or Telluride though. They can rent short-term (given a local property manager), but they are not going to rent to that cop or schoolteacher because they themselves want to use the house or condo at certain times. How do you get around that problem? (And don't suggest expropriating these "exploiters"' houses at gunpoint—not likely to happen.)

Playing the "quality of life" card and capping short-term rentals, however, might be politically feasible, but there will lots of pushbacks from people who depend on that income to pay for the "Christmas house." And there is an economic argument.

One short-term rental manager said,

“All the business owners in Breckenridge who rely on visitor spending, they are getting it from my group,” said Carol Kresge, the manager of the sprawling home that was originally built as a B&B but now can be rented short-term by vacationing groups who pay as much as $4,000 a night. . . . “Hearing that short-term rentals are destroying the character of Breckenridge is disturbing and it’s just not true . . . The visitors who visit the lodge are the character of Breckenridge. They come into town and they spend their money at the local restaurants and shops. A cap on short-term rentals is a broad brush approach designed to solve a problem that hasn’t been well defined.”

The economic argument leads to a larger question: Can outdoor recreation "save" small towns in pretty places. Some economists say no. But that is a separate blog post.

When 'Influencers' Go Wrong

Remains of a social-media influencer eaten by wolves (I wish).

I used to hang out a lot with hunting and fishing writers — even published a little myself —and one sure conversation was always "How can you provide information without giving away too much?"

Do you say you caught this perfect trout "in such-and-such a pool on the South Platte River," or just "in the South Platte River below Cheesman Dam," or "in the South Platte," or "in the mountains southwest of Denver"?  Because it was true that outdoor writers' work could send the hordes to places that previously had been lightly pressured.

Now everyone who catches the fish has to put it on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And that pisses off some people who say that "influencers" are ruining the outdoors.

"There's a picture of me just a few months old and in a backpack, with my parents taking me for a hike through a national forest where I grew up," says Steve [not his real name]. "And as I've grown, my love of the outdoors has grown."

But also growing is Steve's frustration with influencers trampling over his beloved open spaces to get that perfect photograph.

"I drew the conclusion between the rise of this disrespect and the rise of Instagram and social media," he says, speaking to the BBC from a mostly rural area in the western US. "So I decided to start an Instagram account, to fight fire with fire."

So what did "Steve" do? He started an Instagram account called Public Lands Hate You, with posts like this:

You probably know that this account has a bone to pick with influencers who engage in harmful and illegal behavior on your public lands and post it publicly for the world to see. Not only are the initial actions of these influencers undesirable, but by posting their behavior for thousands of people to see, influencers are giving their followers the wrong idea about what is acceptable on your public lands.⁣

Trampling wildflower meadows. Introducing beauty products into hot springs. Crossing closure fences. Off-leash dogs in leash-controlled areas. Approaching wildlife. Ignoring drone laws. All for the perfect shot to promote themselves and their sponsors.⁣⁣

⁣And there is an associated website: Public Lands Hate You, with the slogan "Our public lands are not a prop!" 

It's not that people go to these places, it's that they break laws or disrespect the land in order to get the perfect photo to illustrate their perfect curated life.

Go have a look. Raise a litte ruckus. Those who live by the clicks can die from the clicks.

Feds Sue Historic Durango Train over 416 Forest Fire

Helitanker over the 416 Fire (Inciweb).

The federal government has filed suit against the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Co., a major southwestern Colorado tourist attraction, for startling the 416 Fire in June 2018, reports the Durango Herald.

“The United States alleges that the fire was ignited by burning particles emitted from an exhaust stack on a coal-burning steam engine locomotive owned and operated by the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad,” a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Tuesday.

The lawsuit seeks $25 million to repay firefighting costs.

About 9:45 a.m. June 1, 2018, a resident in the Meadowridge subdivision saw a “wisp of smoke” near a bend in the tracks as the D&SNG passed by, igniting intense speculation that the train was the cause of the 416 Fire.

The neighborhood of about eight homes a few hundred feet from the tracks had grown used to seeing the D&SNG start fires, and residents even had their own water truck to help put out small fires ignited by small cinders emitted from the steam locomotives’ smokestacks.

But their efforts were in vain that day. Even when the railroad’s own water tanker arrived about five minutes later, the fire had advanced too far.

The D&S steam engines do have screens on their funnels, 19th-century technology that stops at least some hot cinders. But the old=time trains did start fires. I remember once looking at Colorado 67 in Teller County from across a valley— it follows an old railroad grade in places — and there are all these patches of aspen above (but not below) the highway. They sure look like places where small fires started along the line and then burned out on their own.

The thing is, not only is the train a big tourist attraction, but at least some residents really like it. One of the homeowners first on the scene to fight the fire also said,

[Cres Fleming] also loves the train. He called himself a “foamer” and “railroad nut,” who has done a lot of volunteer work for the train and played Santa Claus for a number of years on the Polar Express. He and Chione both said they live where they do because of the train.

That, and if you are in downtown Durango during a temperature inversion when the train is leaving the station, you can experience 19th-century street-level atmosphere conditions, otherwise known as "Why the Victorians wore black."

Venomous and Nonvenomous Links

In El Castillo cave, hand stencils join a red disk (not pictured)
that may be Earth's oldest cave art (Science/AAS)

¶ Arizona wants to kill you. I thought the rattlesnakes were bad; now this: "Arizona Hiker Dies After Being Stung by 1,000 Bees."

¶ Americans don't visit national parks anymore — that was the message a couple of years ago. (See the graph for early 2000s.) Now it's "The National Parks Have Never Been More Popular."  Free admission for the 100th anniversary helps, so does cheaper fuel. Or is this just one of those "fat is bad for you / fat is good for you" deals? Will M. and make it to Yellowstone this fall?

¶ In case you missed it — although we are not talking about Chauvet-type art, still the evidence is that the Neanderthal people made art. And of course it's older than the Cro-Magnon stuff.

Blog Stew Built from Stone

• Bishop's Castle, the hand-built fantasy castle that has become a southern Colorado icon, has a new owner—or not. There are complications. If you are on Facebook, there is this.

• "Bent on Birding," a combination birding and historical-prehistorical tour of Bent County in SE Colorado, is coming up.

• Another argument that despite all the dead trees you see, bark beetles do not increase the risk of forest fires. 

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.

Floods, Fire, Buses: Changes at Bandelier National Monument

Bandelier National Monument visitor center with sandbags

M. and I last visited Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico in May 2011, mainly to see the new diorama in the visitor center that her brother had built. Then the Las Conchas fire closed in and threatened those buildings—but they survived (maybe with the help of copious Class A foam).

The brother himself had never seen it, since he lives in Virginia, but we went there Wednesday as part of a family reunion.

"They repainted my lizard," he said. "Crappy job." Apparently someone thought his yellow stripes were not bright enough. And the background mural had been cropped as well, although only he would have noticed that.

One change was the effect of the September 2013 flooding, worst in the monument's history. (See pictures here and videos here). Lots more debris piles and fewer picnic tables — maybe those washed into the Rio Grande.  The visitor center is still sandbagged.

Another is that visitors are now strongly encouraged to park in White Rock and take a free shuttle bus the last eight miles to the visitor center. Apparently this does not apply to those staying in the park campground and/or just driving to the Frey Trail head, judging by the number of cars there. (The bus also stops at the trail head.) There are a few other exceptions too—see the link.

But after years of seeing the main parking lot fill up in the spring and summer and having to turn visitors away, the NPS has taken a new stance.

Blog Stew on Horseback

 ¶ Western dude ranchers are having to buy bigger horses for fatter guests.

"Little horses just aren't sturdy enough to hold up in a dude operation in the Rocky Mountains," Kipp Saile said, noting that about 15 of their 60 horses were Percheron mixes, the largest weighing 1,800 pounds.

¶ Colorado's oil and gas-drilling boom is polluting farm land (spills, drilling waste), and oil companies hope that microbes will clean up the hydrocarbons.

The number of spills reported by companies reached a 10-year peak of 578 last year (43 related to the September floods), contaminating an estimated 173,400 tons of topsoil, according to the COGCC data, which come from reports companies are required to file.

While energy companies responsible for spills recover much of the liquid hydrocarbons during cleanups, an analysis of the data shows that roughly 45 percent stays in soil.

¶ Never mind the propaganda about how corn-based ethanol is "patriotic." Even the business press, like Forbes, is moving to the position that ethanol is a loss overall. (Especially when you use High Plains Aquifer water to grow the corn.)

Seven Falls Added to Broadmoor Empire, or rather "Campus"

Seven Falls, a "legacy" tourist attraction in Colorado Springs — that means that it predates the Chamber of Commerce, perhaps —has been purchased by the Broadmoor Hotel.

Although my maternal grandparents arrived in the Springs in the 1920s, and I have been in and out of the city most of my life, I have never visited Seven Falls! Someone once told me that the flow was augmented via a pipe to make the falls look better (is this true?), and that news convinced that it was merely a tourist trap.

"You have this very unique [sic], one-of-a-kind attraction that has stood the test of time," [said Broadmoor Hotel CEO Steve] Bartolin said. "You get to the top of the stairs and there's a fabulous network of trails. It's just beautiful property. It will be a nice enhancement to our campus."

"Campus"? Have they started a University of Golf?

Colorado's Ugly New "Hazmat" Tourism Logo

This "brand new logo" looks like a hazardous-materials placard. "This truck is carrying carbon monoxide."

Or maybe it's a tent, and you have been left the camping stove on with the tent flaps closed, and now you are dead.

Did someone in the highway department design it? It's highly visible, all right, but does it say "Come visit"?

Colorado's Redwoods

The Big Stump, a fossilized redwood, was once the pride of a commercial resort at the site. The tree would have been a "little" larger than the ponderosa pines now growing around it.

Taller and faster-growing, Colorado's redwoods were in all respects better than those in California — except for having flourished 34 million years ago, before a series of volcanic eruptions suffocated them.

Flash forward to the 1870s, when residents of Colorado Springs could take an excursion train west into the mountains and wander through the petrified logs exposed on the ground, chipping away bits to take home and place on the mantelpiece or in their flower beds.

Visitors chipped away so industriously that the logs are gone, except for those still buried. A generation later, two adjacent commercial establishments controlled the fossil beds, each one part dude ranch, part museum, and part fresh-air resort.

Only in 1969 did the area become the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, which also showcases fossils of quite a few plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates, preserved in volcanic ash.

M. and I stopped by in June 2013 for the first time in (non-geological) ages. We found the new park visitor center and more trails and signage than we remembered.

Too many visitors don't get far from the vistor center. That is actually a stump in the pit, surrounded by a supporting band of steel.

I poop on your signage.

The easy half-mile Ponderosa Loop Trail includes photos of the previous commercial establishments at the fossil bed, as well as a time line of geology and life at the site. Here a modern dinosaur appears to have left some comments on one of the signs.

The monument covers 6,000 acres, and there are 14–15 miles of hiking trails, depending which brochure you read.

We walked another three-mile loop, which crossed the Homestake Pipeline, part of Colorado Springs' water system. The pipeline carries water from a collection system near Aspen, with its flow shared by Aurora and Colorado Springs.

(It's amazing how many Springs residents think their water comes from snow on Pike's Peak, and Aurorans probably don't think at all about it.)

Despite its significance in our hydraulic civilization, the pipeline rates no signage on the hiking trail. Apparently it does not fit the narrative of the fossil beds.

The cleared strip marks the route of the Homestake Pipline through the hills west of Colorado Springs. It was built just before the national monument was created.

Blog Stew, a Little Burnt

Items that might deserve longer individual posts but will not get them. . .

• Speculation about the closure of the Royal Gorge Bridge and park (now reduced to the bridge and a tollbooth, as in 1929) and its effect on southern Colorado tourism, with a telling photograph.

• Unlike Bloomberg, I would not all the American Prairie Preserve project a "land grab." Its rich backers are buying the land. But true, once the number of cattle and/or sheep ranchers falls below some critical point, there might be domino effect on the rest.

• A piece from the Nature Conservancy magazine on "water wars" in the San Luis Valley. Speaking of rich guys buying up big chunks of the West, I don't care how many monks his wife brought in, I never trusted Maurice Strong at all. This was the issue that dominated the 1990s there and led, ultimately to a new map of the valley's west side.

Visitor Opportunities Reduced in Two Colorado National Forests

In northern Colorado, the US Forest Service promises "rolling" closures of trails and roads as beetle-killed lodgepole pines on the Arapahoe National Forest are cut to reduce hazards.

Almost every popular national forest access in Grand County will be affected at some point during the spring and summer, from mountain biking access near the towns of Winter Park and Fraser to hiking and backpacking trailheads to anglers and campers who use the Arapaho National Recreation Area (ANRA). 

in southern Colorado, where windstorms knocked down thousands of trees in the Sangre de Cristo Range, blocking trails and damaging a popular campground on the San Isabel National Forest, there is talk of "prioritizing" the response.

[District ranger Paul] Crespin, [Jeff] Outhier and other USFS officials will be meeting with local elected officials, civic groups and tourism organizations here to explain the situation in the Sangres, and to encourage them to urge summer visitors [instead] to take advantage of trails, campgrounds and public lands in the Wet Mountains. 

Crespin said it may take many months to open the Sangre trails, and some may never be restored to their prior conditions.

In both cases, it's mainly a recreational/tourism issue. If people can't play, will they stay? The Wet Mountains offer some hiking trails and only one developed campground, at Lake Isabel.

(And then there is the whole frozen-cow disposal issue.)

MM and BB?

Found this photo on the Web without clear attribution. It does suggest the 1950s in Yellowstone, when black bears eating garbage were considered to be a cute tourist attraction. And is the cute tourist really Marilyn Monroe?

BB? Black bear. Did you think I meant Brigitte Bardot?

Biking Across the Country

M. and I are on our way home from Yellowstone National Park, and I will have a few more posts about that soon.

This is another version of the logo.

While reading a historical marker, we encountered Missourian Brian McEntire, who is bicycling across the country on what I still think of as the 1976 Bicentennial route. He seemed surprised when I told him that there was still one of the old green-and-white "bike-centennial" signs on Colorado 96 outside of Pueblo.

He has been keeping a log in blog form.