You can start at Bent’s Fort. Near the confluence of the Huerfano and Arkansas Rivers, it was, for many years – until the coming of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad made Pueblo a boomtown – the main crossing of the Arkansas along the Taos Trail. It was once a huge, capricious, fast-flowing monster that ate Conestoga wagons, stock animals, and dreams, and Bent’s Fort was a place where one gathered one’s courage – or tried like hell to get across before spring floods began, leaving the summer and fall to find a homestead and plant a first crop. Now it’s a muddy trickle, what remains after an extensive network of dams has taken its share.
There are no roads by which to follow the Huerfano, and it’s all privately owned ranchland; so the trip takes you west into downtown Pueblo, to the sculpted garden that is the Arkansas Riverwalk. Here the Arkansas is not a muddy ditch, but a turquoise ribbon between manicured patios, terraced flowerbeds, historic monuments, and breezy cafés. A mosaic of braided white, blue, and gold represents Colorado’s great rivers; there’s some irony in its presence here, on the brick-and-steel shoreline of what is, perhaps, the state’s most domesticated waterway.
South on I-25, you’ll pass many gullies and arroyos, but, unless it’s April or May, probably no running water. Forty miles or so south of Pueblo, the Huerfano Butte rises like a black smudge on the prairie. If you take the Butte Road exit and head west, you’ll find yourself on a network of county roads which follow the braided ribbon of individual wagon trails making up the historic Taos Trail. It’s here that you pick up the Huerfano again; along several county roads and Highway 69, you’re following the old Mosca Road that traverses between the Butte and Mosca Pass. The river is fifteen or twenty feet wide and occupies an arroyo perhaps twice that width, two or three feet deep, and in some places broken by small rapids or braided by sandbars.
You’ll pass modern ranches with straight access roads and new houses, and more traditional ranches with farmhouses that may be a hundred years old. Everywhere the fences look the same – they’re barbed wire strung between thick slats of juniper, and start to look ancient during their second summer. Where tributaries join the river, the road crossings show their wagon-trail origins: instead of bridges there are long sloping accesses dug out of the arroyo walls, leading down to a ford and back up again. In spring these crossings may be inaccessible to anything but a four-wheel-drive, which is what most people drive out here anyway.
Sometimes, especially around sunset, the road is blocked by herds of cattle, pronghorn antelope, or mule deer, trying to get to the river. They’ll pick their way down the wall of the arroyo, or find some wagon crossing, and mill around, luxuriating in the clean water and grass which is green and soft even in August. At the ghost town at Badito the north side of the river is faced by a cliff but the south bank slopes softly off into the hills; the meadow there is always home to some wandering handful of beasts, who will sometimes wander into the ruined buildings in search of fodder, and then – incongruously – stick their heads curiously out windows or doors at the sound of your car.
In the foothills just above Gardner, there is a wonderful ruined sheep camp. Below a forty-foot-high rock wall exposed by a small thrust fault, built into the hillside, is an arc of tiny one-room houses. Some are built of stone in the distinctive mixed Ute-Spanish settlement style and may date from 1850; others are post and beam, with large and dramatic windows. They’re built almost on top of each other, sharing exterior walls, and fit into the curve of the hill as if they had grown there. There are other ghost towns and ruined settlements spotting the hills, among the big ranches and the expanses of San Isabel National Forest. Local legend tells of a very old Spanish settlement – already abandoned by the 1820’s – but no one has yet identified it.
The river doesn’t change its character much from Badito to Red Wing. There’s a beautiful old carriage bridge at Gardner, and not much else – the arroyo, the junipers and shrubs and grasses, the occasional cattle or antelope, the birds and insects and small animals mostly heard but unseen. At Red Wing, things start to change as you start to climb. The arroyos become shallower, with walls that slope more softly and then vanish altogether; the meadows become richer and greener, with more grass and wildflowers, less sagebrush and cholla. Cottonwoods in great numbers spread out from their lower-altitude tight clustering around the riverbank, and ponderosa and aspen appear.
Here the river plays peekaboo with the road, a glistening ribbon of blue among the aspens and tall grasses. Many small tributaries join the main course now, from sparkling, fast-running runoff streams flowing through deeply notched beds to streams that are little more than a moistness in a low part of a meadow, a path by which raindrops trickle downstream one by one. Many of these small mountain streams cross the road, which is becoming rougher as you pass in and out of the park, fragmented along the perimeter by chunks of private land.
The ranches and expensive houses fall away, and there is only the road, the river, and the illuminated forest. Aspen leaves make sunlight dance. The deep green of the meadows is interspersed with softer grey-green, grey, and red of Blanca granite and Morrison sandstone, which make up the surface rock in this part of the mountains. The road ends at the Mosca Pass Trailhead, ten thousand feet up in the cirque carved out between Blanca and California by Pleistocene glaciers. The dusty gravel parking lot, pit bathrooms, and water fountains are the only concessions the Forest Service makes to the tourist trade. If you want pretty views seen from a comfortable ski lift, go to Breckenridge; this is wilderness.
Thirty feet up the trail, the parking lot is forgotten. Even in August there may be snowbanks in shadows. You may see bears or elk; you will certainly see other wildlife, which abounds. The trail is narrow but well-maintained, by the hikers themselves more than the Forest Service. There are more tourists now that the Sand Dunes people are promoting the trail; but the bulk of the traffic is still made up of the locals who for many generations have loved this old pass road, once the main wagon-traffic thoroughfare between the Huerfano and the San Luis, and come back every summer, or every weekend during the four or five months that the trail is passable, or even once a decade. In a day of hiking, you may see a dozen other travelers in several small groups, or no one at all.
Trees give way to tundra and bare rock. Somewhere back the main fork of the Huerfano swung off to the south, toward its source in the runoff of the Blanca glacier; the last of the mountain streams have vanished, though you may, here and there, step over a trickle or pass a snowbank melting in the sun. It seems like you’re on top of the world, except that to your north and south, peaks loom another three thousand feet above.
Eventually there is a crest of rock, and nowhere higher to go. The trail winds between boulders, and at some imperceptible moment, between one step and the next, you’ve left the Huerfano Valley and entered the San Luis. This is Mosca Pass, a glorious detour in history. Why did La Veta Pass, some miles to the south, and not this place, become overgrown with railroads and highways and convenience stores? It doesn’t really matter anymore; what matters is what is here, the open sky, the rocks and snow, the treeline far below and the twin valleys that spill out, encircled by the great mountains.
Look to the west, and you can see what took Zebulon Pike’s breath away almost two hundred years ago: a vast sea of sand, mysteriously rising from nowhere at the base of the mountains, spilling golden out into the rich green valley. You can see the sparkle of Medano Creek, the turquoise of the playa lakes and the subtle translucent shifting of green that marks transitions between sabka, prairie, cultivated farmland. On a clear, bright day, far to the southwest, you can see the silver strand that is the Rio Grande; perhaps, looking back and remembering where you came, you can see (or think you see) the dark line of richer soil along the Arkansas.
By this time, it’s late afternoon; as on most days, warm moist air has pooled at the foot of the mountains, cooled in its passage up the slopes, and become the line of clouds which wreath the Sangres in their mysterious sunset majesty. Raindrops will fall, or snowflakes. They will run off your hands, and some will travel down the western slope of the mountains, some divert to the east. For a fleeting moment, you are holding the watershed of three-quarters of a continent in a few drops in your palms. In a moment such as this is transcendent understanding of places of origin; it is transformation, and perhaps, for each individual and for every other life that individual shapes downstream, it is the beginning of a re-balancing of the human in nature.
Originally included in The Edge of Wordless Wonder, the essay & photography section of my undergraduate thesis, August 2008.