Mount Sneffels, one of the San Juan’s “Fourteeners.” More than 20,000 years ago, it jutted up above a sea of ice during the last major period of glaciation. Today, it rises above hills carpeted by aspen. Photo © Branson Reynolds.
Colorado’s San Juan Mountains
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The first time I saw the San Juan Mountains they made me drunk. I was on a road trip and every time I rounded a bend another picture-postcard of the Rockies was waiting, challenging my capacity for beauty. It was like seeing one artistic masterpiece after another. It was too much. Overwhelmed, I kept pulling over to the side of the treacherous mountain road I was driving to grab my camera—or to just sit and stare. My companion—a girlfriend—eventually got irritated. “We’re never going to get there,” she said, referring to our destination, a little mountain town in southwestern Colorado called Ouray. I got a grip on myself and managed to just drive the rest of the way, a good thing considering some of the chasms we were negotiating. That was back in 1989 and that girlfriend and I—she’s now my wife—were to return to the San Juans probably thirty to forty times over the next nine years. It became our escape from the bustle of Santa Fe, until recently our home. When you go someplace that often, it becomes part of you, literally the backdrop against which your life—some of it anyway—gets played out. And when you move away, as my wife and I did not long ago, it comes along in your head, an indistinct yet vivid world where memories mingle with mountains like passing clouds. So many images come to mind when I think of the San Juans. A gorgeous June day in Telluride, surrounded by friends and a huge crowd at the popular bluegrass festival. Soaking in a hot springs at the end of a long day of hiking, the late afternoon sun glowing on an amphitheater of peaks and cliffs. Sitting in an aspen forest so ablaze with fall color that the air itself seemed golden. There are darker memories, too. Rolling my truck after hitting a patch of ice following a day of cross-country skiing near Purgatory, a ski resort north of Durango. Sitting alone beside a wilderness campfire, struggling to come to terms with the fact that a tumor had recently been detected on my mother’s liver. The San Juans, of course, didn’t know and didn’t care when I came to them to work through my problems anymore than they knew or cared when I came to them to have fun. They’re just mountains—just earth and rock punched skyward. But the range is so big and vast, so much like a giant, open-air cathedral, that you feel humbled and joyful when you’re there. It’s a harsh place with harsh weather, but it’s holy ground. The San Juans may be big—they contain a dozen peaks above 14,000 feet, more than any other range in Colorado—but they are fragile, and they have suffered at the hands of humans. Parts of the range were heavily mined at the turn of the century and abandoned silver and gold mines and their accompanying tailings piles dot the landscape like so many bleeding sores. Streams and creeks actually run orange in places and are so acidic that they harbor no aquatic life. Such ugliness in the midst of such beauty is a jarring reminder that a good portion of these mountains is far from pristine. Like other scenic areas in the West, the San Juans—some parts at least—are being loved to death. On holidays like the Fourth of July, Chicago Basin—a stunning high-altitude cirque—is so crowded with nature lovers that it seems more like Chicago at rush hour. Hunters take over large portions of the range in October. And cattle have munched too many lush, mid-altitude meadow areas down to the bone—even in the Weminuche Wilderness, at 499,000 acres the biggest such area in the state. But it’s a testament to the magnificence of the San Juans that it’s easy to forget about these human-inflicted flaws. Where else can you find so many high peaks in close proximity to each other that are volcanic in origin, as is the case in the eastern half of the range? And where else south of Yellowstone can you find country so wild that it may harbor a remnant population of grizzly bears, as is the case in the South San Juan Wilderness, a little-visited 164,000-acre protected area near the New Mexico border? So go there. Or not. I don’t care. All I know is that someday I’ve got to go back. Too much of me is still up there. |