• How to spend a week in the Upper Arkansas River Valley/Sawatch Range of Colorado

   

  Where are you going?

The Arkansas River begins in the Mountains around Leadville Colorado, which is one of the highest elevation cities/towns in the US. The valley that contains the first 70 miles or so of the river is in the central part of Colorado, running more or less North-South, about 100 miles west of Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo. The valley is broad, say 20 miles across near Leadville, narrows to a gorge (downstream about 20 miles) at Granite, then gradually broadens again to about 15 miles across as the river runs down to Salida. There the Arkansas enters an extended series of narrow valleys and gorges, the last of which is the "famous" Royal Gorge near Canyon City.

The Eastern side of the valley is bounded by the Tenmile/Mosquito Range, a mining district, and the Western side is Bounded by the Sawatch Range, also famous for mining, but more famous now for having the most accessible 14’ers (mountains above 14,000 ft) in Colorado. The three main towns in the valley are Leadville in the North, Buena Vista in the center and Salida in the South.

This photo was taken from the mountains in the East, looking over the valley and onto the Sawatch Range in the West. See the rainstorm? 2006 was the rainiest year we’ve seen here.

The mountainous areas on the East and West are largely public land, either BLM or National Forest. The valley floor itself is where most private property is. You’ll likely find accommodations around the major towns, or possibly in one of the "rural residential" housing developments in the valley. Because of the high mountain range to the west, the valley has a mild (since air flowing downslope warms) and dry climate. Typical daytime high temps in the summer on the valley floor are in the low 90’s with negligible humidity. Nighttime lows are in the 50’s and 60’s. As you go up in elevation, the temps all get cooler. Because mountains make their own weather, it’s often impossible to exactly predict what weather you’ll get on any given day. The usual mid-late summer weather pattern starts off cool and clear in the morning, with a few white puffy clouds by noon, and isolated thunderstorms by late afternoon/early evening. In dry years, there may be no storms or rain. In wet years, such as 2006, you might have rain every single day.

What is there to do?

While we haven’t tried every possible thing you can do in this area, we’ve tried a lot of them. Some of the activities are quite "touristy" and of course that’s where you’ll find the most people (I didn’t say crowds because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real crowd here). Other activities range from mildly active things to extremely active things. I’ll start with the laziest and work my way up to the more strenuous activities.

Museums and sightseeing:

In the valley itself, the best museum I know of is the mining museum in Leadville. I’ve personally never been in, but have been told it has a fantastic mineral collection as well as all sorts of interesting history of the area. Leadville also has a train ride that runs from downtown, up to one of the mountain passes to the Northeast and back. It’s not the most "authentic" experience, as they use a diesel locomotive instead of steam, but it will keep kids entertained for 3 hours and if it’s a hot year the ride goes from 10k ft to 12 kft, so the temps will be cool.

Canyon City is about an hour and a half drive southeast of Salida, and from there you can catch the Royal Gorge train, about a 3 hour train ride up through the Royal Gorge and back. Or, not going all the way to Canyon City, you can stop at the tourist trap Royal Gorge Park. If you have the $$, take the helicopter tour of the Gorge, you can’t miss the heliport on US50…

Highest suspension bridge in the world, wanna bungee jump with Christi?

 

Light activities:

For these, I’m assuming you are willing to do a little walking, but no real "hiking" or climbing or anything that down at sea level would cause you to breathe hard (because if you are not in shape, until you have built some altitude acclimatization, just walking up a small hill will have you out of breath at 10,000 ft.). So mostly these things are "drive there and then get out and walk around a bit" type of things.

Also, with a little luck and foresight, you can find housing accommodations that have access to walking trails and such, and we always try to have a little elbow room wherever we stay.

There are many scenic locations that you can drive to from the valley, and usually these get better if you are willing to take a few hundred steps away from your car. Starting in the south is the area around Poncha Pass, ultimately leading to Marshall Pass (40 minutes further on a dirt road). There are a series of well maintained dirt roads to the east of Salida (you’ll hear more about them later). If you take them far enough in, you’ll cross over the southern end of the mosquito range into the South Park basin (think the TV show!). The western side of this range is mostly desert grading into juniper/ponderosa pine, but the higher elevations have nice open valleys with aspen trees and cool breezes.

About halfway between Salida and Buena Vista is Colorado hwy 162 which goes to St Elmo. St Elmo is a partly restored (former) ghost town. Every year more and more of the original (and I imagine not so original) aspects of the town get rebuilt.

Kids love it because there’s a place where there’s a large population of little ground critters (squirrels and chipmunks and so forth) that are very friendly. You can sit on the benches and they’ll crawl all over you in hopes that you’ll feed them. You can buy sunflower seeds right across the street. A little bit of walking will show you some good examples of late 1800’s mountain architecture.

St. Elmo building…

 

Chipmunk…

 

At the top of my favorites list for a way to spend a day in relative relaxation is fishing. The Arkansas river itself is popular with the serious fishermen, and the fishing is good for large trout if you know what you are doing, which means you are an expert fly fisherman, which I’m not by any means. The serious fishing happens before the spring runoff, and after the summer weather pattern shuts down and temps get cooler. So, instead we’re looking for that "lazy" fishing that mostly consists of sitting by the side of a mountain lake and relaxing. The tourist brochures for the area list several area lakes that have fair to decent fishing. We’ve caught fish in every one of them, but over the last 6 years have perfected our techniques. The smaller lakes up US 50 towards monarch pass have good fishing in the evenings for small trout. The best day-outing I know is to take a canoe or kayak to Cottonwood lake west of Buena Vista. The lake is maybe 1/2mile long and 1/5^th mile across, nice mountain setting. The edges of the lake see a fair number of fishermen (locals) but from a paddled boat you can fish the entire lake. What I usually do is sit one (or two small)child(ren) in the front of my tandem kayak and have them troll while I gently paddle. I give each child one lap of the lake to catch as many as they can. Last year or total number of fish brought to the boat (we catch and release since the kids don’t eat fish) was just under 50 in about a 4 hour period.

Here’s Christi and Carina fishing (Fish don’t bite when girls talk)

 

Now I’ll assume you’re willing to walk a bit, probably best in hiking shoes/boots now, up to a few hundred feet elevation gain, or participate in some activity that, if done all day would get you tired. The main things I can think of in this category are, river rafting, horseback riding, and mineral collecting/rockhounding.

There are several commercial outfits that run rafting trips down the Arkansas. The trips range from (maybe) an hour on the calmest stretch of the river (for babies) to full day or more long "expeditions" down the steeper stretches of the river.

We have always taken the most popular run (Brown’s canyon) as it’s reasonably safe for the uninitiated and children older than 6 or 7 years (last year was Carina’s second year at just 6) but still fun for older kids and adults. But, it’s not just a smooth ride down the "lazy river"! Of course this is not cheap, probably 60 bucks or so for adults and half that for kids, so you do it one time per year. This year I intend to bring my own inflatable whitewater kayak and try some of the runs myself (I’m gonna buy a tandem, so I’ll need a victim to come with me!).

This is one of the rougher sections of the river that the commercial trips run...

Here’s Christi jumping off the famous jumping rock…

 

There are two or so commercial outfits that run horseback riding expeditions. We’ve tried 2 different ones, with varying degrees of satisfaction. Sometimes trail permission changes mean that some trip you took the year before is no longer available, so this is more of a hit and miss proposition than the river rafting. But we have one child who we’d not be able to pry out of the valley if she didn’t get to ride so we always do something. Last year we used an outfit in Cottonwood Canyon west of Buena Vista. They had nice trails and would even let you gallop the horses. Girls, you’ll love it (so they tell me), guys, consider wearing a cup or a speedo underneath!

The family horseback riding photo…

 

Believe it or not, I have a family of rockhounds. So, we spend at least a few days out of our usual 2 weeks looking for interesting rocks/mineral specimens in the area. It turns out that the mountains around the Upper Arkansas River Valley have one of the most concentrated mineralized areas in the US, so the picking is ripe! We’ve read all the guide books and checked out most of the locations that are "public". We often go back home with a 5 gal bucket of samples, although you don’t have to do that to have fun. Some of the locations require a little bit of hiking, though most you can drive right up to with a 4wd vehicle, or even 2wd with good ground clearance. The list of things you can collect includes: high quality granite (like for statues and trophies), marble (more carving), iron minerals, tourmaline, quartz crystals, olivine/peridot (a green gemstone), feldspar crystals, and rose quartz.

Marble Quarry… This is in the same area that the very first photo was taken. We’re up behind (east) of Salida. Very interesting geology here, but that tends to bore most people. Several of the rockhounding locations are all in this area.

 

"Salida blue" granite quarry, commercially quarried in the past. Good yard boulders now…

 

Moderately Strenuous activities:

This is the domain of what we call "the family hike". I usually come with the plan to hike/climb a new 14’er or two every year, but I need a warm up hike to build my acclimatization, so I tend to try and drag everyone else along too. We have one favorite that we always do, called waterdog lake. It’s about 1000 ft vertical climb over a couple of miles to a pretty lake (actually there are several lakes further back in if you are willing to go a little further). The only requirement is that EVERYONE MAKES IT, no wimping out. Basically it’s a good filter, if you can’t make this one, don’t bother with any dreams of trying to do a 14’er as they are all at least a factor of 4 harder. One nice thing about this hike is that there are often nice wildflowers up by the lake.

 

 

 

Strenuous activities:

What vacation would be complete with out some brutal physical exercise? Well, you are in luck in the Arkansas Valley. I can think of several activities to get your heart pounding. Given the mountains, of course number one is to climb a 14’er. Now, the Sawatch range is the highest in Colorado and the highest in the Rockies. But, fortunately for us "most of the year flatlanders", the 14’ers here are the easiest in Colorado and you will be hard pressed to find meaningful technical routes, most routes are walk-ups and have at most a bit of scrambling at the summit. I’ve climbed (from easiest to hardest), Mt Shavano, Mt Elbert (the highest in CO),Mt Antero, Mt Belford, Huron Pk, Mt Yale, Mt Princeton, La Plata Pk, Tabeguache Pk (you have to climb Shavano first, then descend 1000 ft, then back up 1000 ft and then all that in reverse going back home!), and finally Mt Harvard. All my pictures from those are on slides, not digitized yet… There’s also a nice 13,988’ mountain called Ouray Pk south of Mt Shavano that nobody climbs so it makes a nice hike in complete solitude. I still need to climb Mt Columbia, Missouri Mt, Mt Massive, and the Mt of the Holy Cross to get all the 14’ers in the Sawatch range. Many of the trails lower down on those mountains allow mountain bikes, and there is no shortage of dirt/jeep roads for mountain biking. The paved roads over some of the mountain passes make nice road-bike hill climbs, although the busier roads are probably too dangerous to do routinely. I have climbed Monarch Pass and it was a great but scary ride. Not enough exercise yet? There’s a foot race run in the valley every year called the Leadville 100. 100 mile run that crosses several mountain passes and never goes below 10,000 ft elevation! There are many good trails for running. I run a bit of the Colorado trail by Mt Shavano to get acclimatized, and some of the 14’ers can be run, particularly Mt Antero.

The record for running all 51 colorado 14’ers is about 13 days and some hours, with a total cumulative elevation gain of more than 300,000 ft.

Finally, there’s a good lap swimming pool in Salida, 25 meters, deep water.

Just at treeline on the way up Mt Shavano…

That’s the summit of Mt Shavano in the background, but the weather was getting worse (and there’s still 1000 vertical feet to go).

Katie and Christi on Esprit Pt, 13,600. We had to stop our ascent of Shavano due to building weather (see the gray cloud, lightning is the biggest risk up here)

The view from Esprit Pt. Sittin’ on top of the world. Pike’s peak 100 miles away is visible.

Back down at the trailhead. Christi’s exhausted, but Katie is energized as this is the highest she’s ever climbed…

More weird activities:

That’s not all you can do, I have two more favorites. Gold prospecting and taking pictures of wildflowers. The Colorado Gold belt goes right through the valley, and so there’s excellent placer gold in the Arkansas river as well as a few other areas. Most people are familiar with "panning" where you take a bunch of sand and gravel and "swirl" it around in a pan and wash out everything but the gold. As you can imagine, there is a bit of a technique to it and you can’t just slop it all around and expect to get any gold. In addition, there are some better ways of getting more gold from the ground. The simplest technique beyond panning uses a sluice to wash away lighter materials from heavy materials (gold, plus some other minerals). Here you let the river do part of the work for you. You dig, the river "washes".

Finally there are 2 "motorized" ways to get even more gold, dredging and high-banking. A dredge is an underwater vacuum cleaner that sucks up sand and gravel and runs it through a sluice to separate out the gold. A highbanker is similar, but is used on land, rather than in the river. You shovel in material that then gets washed by the sluice and a gas powered pump supplies the water. I have a combination dredge/highbanker that I use on the Arkansas and in the surrounding areas. I do find gold! Not enough to make a living of course, but enough to have something worth looking at. The main thing you have to be willing to do is get wet and or dirty!

Here’s the gold prospecting "stuff"

 

Here’s someone running the dredge nozzle. The kids are playing in the river upstream…

 

More good dredging…

 

Here’s Christi checking the highbanker for nuggets…

Christi and Katie digging up material to run through the highbanker. This was the most productive surface placer mine in Colorado up to 1911

When environmental problems shut them down…

 

 

Wildflowers: