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| Fremont Pass, named after the American explorer who traveled over it in the 1840s. |
When I first came to Colorado, I was struck by how people, at least some people, described their car trips as going over passes rather than naming a route number. As in, "went over Kenosha Pass" or "lot of snow on Berthoud Pass when I came back" or "went skiing at Careron Pass." The term comes from the Latin "passus"...meaning step or pace. So these passes, some of them paved, are routes for going from one side of a mountain or mountain range to another....from one river basin to another.
Fremont Pass forms part of the continental divide....on the north side, water flows downhill as the Blue River into the Colorado, flowing west and south for 1,500 miles to the Gulf of California. It doesn't flow freely as much is contained in ponds to catch runoff from the huge Climax Mine. The mine extracts molybdenum, used in making high strength steel alloys, and is still the largest such mine in the world. It has been closed for decades but it due to begin operations again this summer....providing much needed jobs to the town of Leadville on the other side of the pass.
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| Climax Mine |
The south side of Fremont Pass contains the headwaters of the Arkansas River which flows 1,500 miles east to the Mississippi, thence to the Gulf of Mexico. The river follows a rift valley past the towns of Leadville, Buena Vista and Salida before rushing down to the Great Plains through the Royal Gorge, a canyon some1,200 feet deep and only 50 feet wide in places. The headwaters, though, occupy an wide, open valley, gathering snowmelt from the surrounding hills and moutains.
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| Headwaters of the Arkansas |
I learned about these river basins largely on week-long bike tours, like Ride the Rockies, when biking up (and then speeding down) Fremont and other passes provides the time to put the pieces of mountain geography together. A mountain pass is a place to pause, to get off the bike or out of the car and look both ways. Usually one is heading, stepping as the word implies, one way or the other: west to the coast or east to the Mississippi. But occasionally the pause is an opportunity to ask, "What's the direction I want to go in?" "Where do I want to go?" "Which flow of the water do I want to follow?"
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| The Arkansas beginning its journey east. |
