Joyful Journey

The San Luis Valley has at least three established hot springs, but I suspect there are others hidden away on private lands here and there. Joyful Journey is located on the valley floor just off Highway 17 south of Villa Grove. Water comes from the spring at 140 degrees Fahrenheit and is cooled by water from other wells. It has three main pools set out in open space on a 500 acre ranch. The pools are oriented east, toward the eroding western slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.



In the afternoon, a sudden storm…harbinger of a cold front…rushed down the valley from the north. The rain and hail pitter-pattered and sometimes slammed on the canvas roof of the yurt I had rented. But when the rain (and hail) stopped, the earth was quiet. Large clouds (and probably some snow) remained on the high mountains…looking like vast wooly herds of sheep driven down to the valley pastures by an advancing winter.





Other travelers stopped to the ranch’s small cluster of yurts and teepees. A couple from Boston built a fire; another couple from Denver lit a bowl of “mother’s finest” and passed it around. Then folks went off to soak in the hot pools (open til 11:00). The moon came up from behind the clouds…looking for a moment as if it were caught in the teepee’s lodgepoles. The earth became very quiet.

Creede

I came down to the San Luis Valley thinking my journey would then move onto Lake City, Silverton. But time unfolded its bedspread here so I stayed. The Orient Land Trust Hot Springs , filled up over the weekend...they keep their human carrying capacity low so that people do not get in the way of the natural surroundings.

So I headed cross the valley floor and up a side canyon to Creede, former mining town….the largest silver mine going when the silver market collapsed in 1893. In ’93, the Federal Government decided to no longer use a silver standard. Washington would no longer buy the metal at a fixed price. Ahhh…government intervention in the market place…my, my…sometimes we forget that the current recession/depression is simply part of a cycle of capitalism. Towns and lives often twist in the wind. When it was going strong, Creede had over 10,000 residents. Today it is just a tad above 350.



Steep cliffs, remnants of an ancient caldera, rise up at the end of Creede’s main street. A 17 mile loop road goes past some of the main mines but the regrowth forests cover many a forgotten entrance to the smaller sites. The road made for a good morning bike ride. The main business in town during the summer, though, is the repertory theatre…they put on a very funny production of the “Putnam County Spelling Bee” on Saturday night. And tourism. And tourists sunbath beneath the cliffs that hold inside dark abandoned tunnels in which so many thousands of miners labored to make other men rich (as long as it lasted).

Valley View

The dirt road stretches east across the San Luis Valley floor...leads up to the hot springs in the foothills...always gives me pause as I take those final miles. The road reads like a thin introductory chapter in a book read many times over. A collection of short stories, pieced together from people sitting around the pools, from the hiking trails ranging around the old mine and miners' camps, from the formations of the clouds at dawn and at sunset.



Yesterday I hiked past a small memorial to the miners who died in a collapse of a tunnel (tunnel number four)at the Orient Mine, a mile or so from my cabin. The memorial is a recent one, composed of a tin marker and rocks, bones and random small objects left by visitors. In 1893, the roof of the tunnel fell on six workers...their bodies were never found but in 1893 they perhaps did not search as diligently as they might today. Foundations of the miners' homes (it was a company town) line the slopes below the mouth of the mine. The mine continued to operate until the 1930s, sending some 2,000,000 tons of iron ore to Pueblo during its time of operation.



At sunset, Brazilian free tailed bats - as many as 250,000 - fly out of the mine from a vast hole in the side of the mountain. The hole was created by the collapse of another section of tunnel after the mine had been abandoned. The bats mainly feed on insects on the agricultural lands on the valley floor. The bats bring new life to the old, cold, dark tunnels under these warn foothills.