Review by Ed Quillen
Geography – September 1994 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Passes of Colorado – An Encyclopedia of Watershed Divides
Ed Helmuth and Gloria Helmuth
Published in 1994 by Pruett Publishing Co.
ISBN 0-87108-841-X
WHEN THERE’S A WALL of mountains in front of you, the sensible course is to go around, not through. Thus the routes of the Santa Fé and Overland trails, which by-passed present-day Colorado in favor of easier routes.
But not everyone was so prudent, and the result of this folly is the 469 named passes, divides, saddles, and gaps that authors Ed and Gloria Helmuth of Buena Vista found in Colorado.
The pass names themselves are a delight: Whiskey, Dead Man, Coffeepot, Calamity, Cinnamon, Fancy, Hardscrabble, Hoodoo, Last Dollar, Milk Cow, Corkscrew, Buzzard, Slumgullion, Troublesome, Red Dog.
Some names pop up often: three apiece of Columbines and Cottonwoods, five Gunsights, and seven Utes.
Passes aren’t exclusive to the central cordillera. The Helmuths found dozens in the western basin-and-plateau zone, as well as a few out on the plains. Most pass collections stop at Monument Hill (a/k/a Palmer Divide, Black Forest, Arkansas Divide) between Denver and Colorado Springs, but the high plains to the east also offer such crossings as Pawnee Pass (4,424 feet) near Sterling and Packers Gap (4,705) in Otero County.
Doubtless this is the most complete list of Colorado passes ever compiled, which makes it a must for the Colorado buff. It’s organized as an encyclopedia, so the passes appear in alphabetical order. That’s not always a convenient arrangement, but the index provides a good cross-reference for passes with more than one name, and the schematic maps in back allow for geographical grouping.
Don’t look here for detailed routes. They point you to the proper maps for trail-finding, and tell you whether a pass is generally accessible by regular auto, 4WD, burro, or foot. To give you a feel for the text, here’s the entry for one of my favorites, which someday I will surmount:
CALICO PASS
Elevation: 12,540 feet
Location: T51N R6E, Map 6
County: Chaffee
Topo: St. Elmo
National forest: San Isabel
Other name: Cyclone
Calico Pass is accessible by foot. It divides the waters of Grizzly Gulch to the north and Cyclone Creek to the south.
A well-used trail once crossed this pass to move miners from the South Arkansas Valley to the mining community around St. Elmo. Today it is a hiker’s find and provides access to those wishing to climb high peaks.
The pass is between Grizzly Mountain and Calico Mountain. The trail itself used to be called the Cyclone Creek Trail. The pass is not named on forest service or topo maps. James Grafton Rodgers located and named it in his listing of Colorado’s geographic features.
ALTHOUGH I FOUND Passes of Colorado generally accurate, some errors appeared. Juan Bautista de Anza noticed Cochetopa Pass in 1779, but he didn’t cross it. It’s doubtful that he named the pass he did cross, Poncha, “after the Spanish world for mild,” since Anza’s journal refers to “a very narrow canyon with almost inaccessible sides,” which “cost us considerable work to conquer.”
The book’s rail lore is often wrong. For instance, the D&RGW line over Poncha Pass was never converted to standard-gauge before its abandonment in 1951. A railroad wye does not replace a roundhouse, although it might serve in lieu of a turntable. The Colorado Midland line up Ute Pass was not abandoned, except for wildflower excursions, in 1916 — it became part of the Midland Terminal, and carried gold ore from the mines of Cripple Creek to the mills of Colorado City until 1949.
At 11,608 feet, the Alpine Tunnel under Altman Pass was nowhere near “the next-highest point ever reached by steam-powered locomotives in the world.” Lines in Peru climb to over 15,000 feet, and even in Colorado, steam trains used to climb 14,110-foot Pikes Peak before diesels arrived in Manitou Springs.
I didn’t see some interesting (interesting, anyway, to Colorado buffs) trivia that seemed to belong. Buchanan Pass, for instance, is the easternmost crossing of the Continental Divide in the United States. The 8,710-foot Muddy Pass between Kremmling and Walden is the lowest spot on the Divide in Colorado.
Nonetheless, The Passes of Colorado will be a useful and entertaining addition to my shelves of Colorado lore. No matter what obscure crossing I thought of — Hartman Divide, Venable, Cameron Mountain — it was in here.
And if Passes whets your appetite for pass lore, get Marshall Sprague’s The Great Gates: The Story of the Rocky Mountain Passes, which puts the encyclopedic entries of Passes in historical and geographic context. With these two books, you’ll get a lot more than scenery the next time you pass from one drainage to another.
— Ed Quillen
