Essay by Ed Quillen
Land – October 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
THERE’S AN OLD SAYING that often pops up either in semantics classes or when discussing Zen: “The map is not the territory.” Its meaning seems so obvious that we seldom give it much thought (of course there’s a difference between a drawing and the object it purports to represent), but around here, it’s something we should always bear in mind. In Central Colorado, the map is not the territory, and it may not even be a useful representation of the territory.
That can lead to trouble, as we learned over Labor Day weekend, when Brad Goettemoeller and Nate Ward decided to tackle the Rainbow Trail on their mountain bikes. Brad is engaged to our daughter Columbine. She had some scheduling conflicts with her job, so she couldn’t meet Brad and Nate along the trail with supplies. Thus I got asked, and I agreed.
Nate and Brad were going to start at Silver Creek in the Marshall Pass area; that’s the utmost north end of the Rainbow Trail, which extends across the Sangre de Cristo Range for at least 100 miles to Music Pass above the Great Sand Dunes. The trail, some of it built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s for fire-fighter access, is open to foot, horse, bicycle, and motorcycle use, but much of the land above the trail is part of the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness Area, designated in 1993.
Brad and Nate had packed Columbine’s Blazer with their supplies and additional gear. According to the original plan, I’d meet them late Saturday afternoon where the Hayden Pass road crosses the Rainbow Trail, about 50 miles from where they started.
I knew the spot, and agreed that it was a good meeting place, but Brad and Nate were running behind schedule. They had a cell phone (I don’t), and at about 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, I got a call at home from Brad. They weren’t making as good a time as they’d hoped, so they wanted to meet at Kerr Gulch in the Howard area.
I’d been to the top of Kerr Gulch before, and Brad’s description confirmed my memory: an open area where the rough road pretty much ended, followed by some trails that led up for about half a mile to the Rainbow Trail. No problem, I told Brad, although I joked that they should just meet us at Bear Creek – it was a lot closer for all of us, and an easy spot to find.
Just as Martha and I were preparing to head for Kerr Gulch — we planned to get in a late afternoon walk in the mountains – the phone rang again. Nate and Brad were even further behind than they’d expected, so could we meet them at a closer spot?
Bear Creek, I hoped, but they indicated a place I’d never been. Their map, as well as the one I had at hand, showed a road that went from Howard to an alpine tarn called Hunt’s Lake. That road intersected the Rainbow Trail, so we could meet at the crossing at 6:30 p.m.
Okay, I agreed. As a railroad buff, I’d been up there as far as the abandoned town of Calcite, a settlement whose quarries were reached by rail from Howard in 1903. Past that was terra incognita from my vantage, but one map showed it as Frémont County Road 4A, and another showed it as Forest Road 1405. Just to be sure I was current, I looked at the area on the U.S. Geological Service website maps. No road numbers, but the road from Calcite to Hunt’s Lake was on the map.
THUS PREPARED, we drove down to Howard, then turned up Frémont County Road 4. But after we got into the mountains, complications began. The designated route ended at a stone-walled gate with a sign that advised us that further progress was illegal, so we turned around, thinking we’d find another route up to the Rainbow Trail.
The area has been seriously subdivided, though, with sideroads going every which way. We tried several of them, but they just seemed to circle back around, after leading up to high scrub-brush covered lots which offer fine views – or will offer fine views, once all of the brokerage “For Sale” signs come down.
After touring those roads, we finally realized that we were getting nowhere, and we turned around and went back to Howard, thinking we could call Nate and Brad from there. In Howard, I tried to use the pay phone outside the Broken Arrow Café, but it didn’t work. So I went inside, and you couldn’t ask for friendlier people. I explained the situation to the waitress, and she brought out the cook, who said he often hiked and biked in that country, and he couldn’t think of any good way to drive from Howard to Hunt’s Lake – the road was blocked by gates, even though my map showed it as a public thoroughfare.
The waitress lent me a phone, and I left a “we’ll be at Kerr Gulch” message with Brad and Nate. It was getting late, but there was still another hour or two of daylight left, and I couldn’t think of anything better to do.
The Broken Arrow people were so nice that I plan to eat there the next time I drive east from Salida. But at that point, Martha and I needed to go to Kerr Gulch. We got to the top, the meadow with a sign, and found the side trail that led to the Rainbow Trail.
There were also a couple of old roads that led up, but they were steep and narrow and looked like excellent places to get stuck without a turnaround. We walked for a ways, but it was getting pretty dark, and we turned around before we got to the Rainbow Trail.
In the meantime, Brad and Nate had waited at the intersection of the Rainbow Trail and the Hunt’s Lake road, and had decided we weren’t going to make it. So they started down the road, figuring to end their trip early, until they encountered a locked gate which explained that “trespassers will be shot.”
[Calcite area]
MARTHA AND I waited until it was really dark for Brad and Nate. But there was no sign of them, so we left some water and went back to town. There we encountered two friends of Brad’s from Fort Collins who had planned to spend the holiday weekend mountain-biking around Crested Butte. They’d gotten rained out, though, and had come to Salida. One was a guy named Doug, who had a cell phone, and when we got in touch with Brad, he asked us to please come back up to Kerr Gulch.
Doug offered to go on his own, but I figured he’d have trouble finding and navigating Kerr Gulch on his first trip in the dark, so I rode along. We got to the top, and honked the horn, blinked the lights, and otherwise tried to get Nate and Brad’s attention. The cell-phones wouldn’t connect from the top, but if we went back down a ways, we could talk to them.
Nate and Brad didn’t have nearly enough equipment for an overnight stay — no heavy coats or sleeping bags — but they did have lighters. When Doug and I called them, they had a fire going (which we couldn’t see), but they didn’t have headlamps, and it was too dark for them to find the path that led from the Rainbow Trail to the Kerr Gulch Road.
We had a headlamp and a lantern, however, so Doug headed uphill, while I stayed with the Blazer. But even though a half-moon had risen by then, Doug couldn’t see his way in the dark well enough to stay on the trail. In fact, when he realized he may have strayed off course, Doug wasn’t even sure he could find his way back to the Blazer. Indeed, he said he was glad that I kept bellowing whenever he hollered, or he couldn’t have made his way back.
In theory, the old road up to the Rainbow Trail might be drivable. It could also be a way to get stuck, so that there would be four people, instead of two, marooned overnight in the woods.
WE COULDN’T FIND Brad and Nate and they couldn’t find us, and they had a fire. Although their night might be cold and miserable, we finally decided that it shouldn’t be dangerous. They were both strong and healthy and young — at least 30-something sure seems young to me — and they said they were reasonably warm.
Finally, sometime between midnight and 1 a.m., Doug and I headed back down Kerr Gulch. And as soon as there was enough light on Sunday morning, Brad and Nate found the route to the Kerr Gulch Road; before the sun was very high, they called from the Broken Arrow Café.
They were fine. Nate observed that “something like this happened to me about six years ago, and after that, I promised myself that I’d always carry a headlamp with me. But this time I forgot.”
Brad said they came through the night fine with the fire, “but by that point we were pushing the edge. If one of us had twisted an ankle, or if it had started to rain or snow, we could have been in a lot of trouble.”
He was right, and we were all glad nothing else had gone wrong. Much of the trouble, though, had come from the maps, which showed a public road where there wasn’t one. Had we known that, we might well have met at Bear Creek that afternoon, rather than attempt to meet at the Hunt’s Lake Road.
Curious as to why the map and the territory disagreed, I started calling around Frémont County offices on Tuesday, the next business day. It’s a good place to get run-arounds. The commissioners’ office advised me to call the road office, where I left a message that was never returned. The county attorney’s secretary wouldn’t put me through, plead as I might.
Eventually I reached Keith McNew, the Frémont County Commissioner from the west end. His term ends in January, and he’s term-limited so he’s not in the race this fall.
I asked him why the maps showed a public road where there wasn’t one. “Those maps aren’t official,” he noted, but even if I had a current official Frémont County Road Map, “it might show that as a public road.”
That’s because “our maps are out of date here. That’s one thing I’d like to do before I leave office – get the county road map up to date.”
McNew said the road used to be public before it was blocked at both ends by a private landowner, “but the county abandoned the right-of-way before I took office eight years ago. I don’t know exactly when it happened, or why.”
Suffice it to say that it happened years ago – plenty of time for the maps to match the territory.
ACCURACY DEPENDS on which map you use, though. The USGS map, the most recent version available on the Internet, shows the road as going through. Brad’s map showed a road going through. The official U.S. Forest Service map of San Isabel National Forest, which I bought after our adventures, does not show a through road, but you would have to look hard to see that, and even then you couldn’t be sure from the map (which was published in 1998).
The small gap on the map between the end of the road and the Rainbow Trail is nearly indiscernible due to some lines for a river, a trail, and the forest service boundary. That break is only clear with a magnifying glass, and then it’s imperceptible unless you know what you’re looking for. Besides, even if you saw the gap, from the looks of things the trail should end a stone’s throw away from the road.
As for why the county abandoned the road, I could look into it. But it’s too late to change anything, now.
But savvy buyers look for private land which adjoins public land these days, and that means more roads will probably be abandoned.
PERSONALLY, I don’t think citizens should be able to hog our public lands for themselves by limiting access to them and I don’t appreciate it when county commissioners let vital access to our public lands slip away.
But many citizens applaud the practice. People moving into mountain subdivisions inevitably want decent roads, but they usually crave rural retreats, so they’re not real keen on public roads that allow just anybody to pass through, and maybe make noise or churn up dust. (This may explain why we keep seeing more and more impressive gates that guard the entrances to new upscale mountain subdivisions.)
And there’s also an environmental lobby which often portrays roads as tools of ecological degradation. Keep a back road open, they argue, and you’re encouraging development, disturbing wildlife habitat, allowing motorized access to delicate zones, etc.
They’re not entirely wrong, but at some point, we seem to be losing the idea of “public access to public land.” The upscale land-buyers would often prefer that they alone have convenient access to the public land near their parcels, so they’re unlikely to oppose certain right-of-way abandonments, and the environmental lobby often supports those abandonments, too. Combine those two forces, and there’s some serious political clout.
Of course, in sheer numbers, there are probably more recreational users and locals who would prefer not to let our public roads go. But recreationalists tend to be split into the motorized and non-motorized lobbies, and locals tend to be wrangling about new subdivisions, apartment complexes, and super Wal-marts, and as a result there’s no cohesive lobby left to fight for maintaining public access to public lands.
But perhaps that’s actually a good thing. After all, the environmentalists may be right. Private roads may be better for our public lands. Or are they?
Unfortunately, that question is probably unanswerable. Perhaps private roads are better for the environment, for a time, but what happens when the grandkids want to subdivide Grandpa Padrone’s estate into 150 exclusive sites with a jet port? What happens when the owners of those 35-acre sites want to re-subdivide into 5-acre parcels? What happens when the people with 5 acres decide to erect guest cottages?
At that point, our county commissioners will probably let them, just like they let our public roads go, because it’s good for the economy. After all, realtors, contractors, and local businesses rely on growth.
But these days, much of our growth is in second-homes, and many of the people who visit them buy their food, clothes, cars, furniture, household goods, and even toilet paper elsewhere.
In Colorado, businesses pay the brunt of property taxes, not home-owners. Thus these new homes often offer a windfall when they’re under construction. New homes temporarily keep contractors, carpenters, realty agents, janitors, and landscapers employed. But afterwards our sparsely populated counties have to provide fire protection, law enforcement, and road maintenance for those remote, difficult-to-serve properties whose owners often aren’t around often enough to support local businesses or pay much in the way of sales taxes.
So to keep our counties going we have to attract more developers, and build more houses. Then once those homes are built, and the owners are off basking in the sun somewhere, and the construction workers are out-of-work for the season, and business is too darned slow, we have to attract more developers, to build more houses….
And that’s definitely not good for the environment.
[Forest Service map]
Getting back to the maps, if they had been accurate, then Brad and Nate wouldn’t have wasted time, energy, and daylight heading down a route where trespassers were not merely unwelcome, but were threatened with death.
Roads, however, are the bigger issue,here. Roads are more important than maps, because without them, strollers, hikers, picnickers, mountain bikers, and motorcyclists don’t have much access to our trails — and in the event of mishaps and accidents, they are more at risk. This lack of access is intrinsic to wilderness areas, but should it happen where there are roads in use?
On the other hand, however, roads are also just another small part of an even bigger problem.
WE’RE CURRENTLY TURNING our public lands over to private concessionaires so they can make a profit. And our towns and counties are putting in new subdivisions which don’t come anywhere near paying for themselves, and we’re building new roads and bridges…. And who’s paying for all of this?
Our businesses and citizens. In all probability, however, they would do that gladly — if they could. But they’re not paying these bills in cash, they’re paying them in deprivation. Wages here are low, profits are low, benefits are rare….
The only truly grand thing that the people who work here have going for them is the scenery, and their love for the land. Yet we’re parceling out that land, dividing it up, and selling it off.
In the West, we keep converting acres of sagebrush, desert, cliffs, tundra, river bottoms, and avalanche slides into pure gold. The land rush is on — enough of a land rush to keep our towns and counties growing (even though it never seems to be enough to keep local wages sprouting).
Do we really need to supplement this boom by giving our public roads and lands away?
— Ed Quillen