This past week, I went looking for trails, passes over the mountains, to scout out for snowshoeing or cross country skiing. Sun and warm temperatures filled the valley...one had to drive or hike into the hills to find snow. Or ice as in ice fishing...a sport little understood by your blogger.
And on these hikes and drives come constant reminders of how the economics of natural resources has shaped the human ecology. Recreation and mountain aesthetics...that is tourism...have come to dominate the upper Arkansas Valley. Along with ranching and some farming. The growing season for crops is very short. And the land is dry without irrigation water that is increasingly expensive.
But ranching and farming, after all, developed in support of the mines, the smelters, the railroads that brought boom prosperity to the land. The mountains are dotted with the ruins of those mines and some remnants of the industrial past have been preserved...a single smokestack climbs skyward in Salida marking the site of a major ore processing plant that employed hundreds. It was built to try, unsuccessfully, along with eight others o move into higher air waves the black and toxic pollution that sickened cattle and men.
So the landscape is a kind of artifice...with reminders of the past scattered along the roads and the trails that snowmobilers, skiers, hikers use to "enjoy the outdoors." Old mine buildings form points of interest in the higher snow covered valleys.
and there is always the possibility that some part of the landscape, some fragment of its history, can be bought and made into one's own. Me? No. This landscape can not be owned anymore than time can be owned. It can only evolve as economy and culture change in ways that are not quite predictable. After all, what would the future be if it could be known?
