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.
