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The sign isn't what you expect amid the trees on the
front of Mt. Princeton. One arrow points north, with the
legend DENVER 188,
and the other points south,
DURANGO 262.
That was where they finished the
Colorado Trail Friday afternoon, in a ceremony complete
with the cutting of ribbons, the driving of a golden spike
and the making of speeches.
I was even thanked in one speech, although my direct contribution to the Colorado Trail consisted of about 20 minutes one summer afternoon in 1984, over on the stretch between Middle and South Cottonwood creeks. I wanted to see how you worked a pulaski, and Colleen Jones, the co-leader of that crew, was glad to supervise while I struggled with a stump.
Back in 1984, it looked as though the Colorado Trail might not be completed until the end of this century. After an impressive start in 1974, public interest had dwindled to where every summer brought only two to four miles of new trail, with dozens of miles left to go before Denver and Durango would be linked. There were dedicated volunteers, but not enough of them.
As a free-lance writer always looking for articles to
write and sell, I called Empire Magazine, the Post's Sunday
supplement in those days, saying that it should run a story
about the trail. The management agreed, sending Dave
Buresh up to take pictures while I talked to a volunteer
trail crew, and on Dec. 9, 1984, Trail to Nowhere
appeared.
The response, to say the least, was gratifying. You always wonder whether anyone besides your friends and relatives ever reads anything you write, and the Colorado Mountain Club was besieged with offers to volunteer for trail work. The moribund Colorado Trails Foundation was replaced by an active organization, Friends of the Colorado Trail. Then-governor Dick Lamm spent a day or two building trail, drawing further attention.
Less than three years later, instead of the 10 or 15 years that seemed likely in 1984, the trail is complete. I'm not all that prone to modesty, and I did work hard on that story, so I'm pleased to enjoy such recognition as comes my way.
But the main reason the article did so much for the trail wasn't really my doing. Writers get by-lines, but editors toil in anonymity. Mike Rudeen was editing Empire then, and he kept throwing draft after draft back at me.
Find out more about why this foundation died,
he
ordered. Whose idea was the trail in the first
place?
he prodded. There's more to building a trail
than stomping a path. What's the full process?
he
demanded. How much of the trail is complete now, and how
much is left to go -- in detail?
I had presumed that somewhere, someone had compiled a detailed log of trail progress. That someone turned out to be me, after calling every district ranger along the proposed trail route. It was time-consuming, often tedious work, and between calls I muttered awful things about Rudeen's ancestry and intelligence. But he was right; the story as published was vastly superior to what I'd first submitted. He made a so-so feature into an article that caught public attention.
Mike Rudeen wasn't among those mentioned at the ceremony. Neither was Cindy Rivera, who was the forest ranger in charge of recreation here before she was transferred. She made the Colorado Trail a priority along the Sawatch Range; the Salida district was among the very few that put paid crews to work on the Colorado Trail. Her enthusiasm was contagious as she promoted the trail to everyone she saw.
And what of the thousands of people who did the actual construction, from the convicts at Buena Vista who cleared routes with chainsaws to the volunteers who donated a week's vacation to wield pulaskis and mcleods? And the Forest Service people who sometimes bucked their bureaucracy to make sure that trail construction continued?
There probably isn't a way to recognize everyone who had a hand in the Colorado Trail. Which may be just as well. The best way to honor their work is not to ponder names, but to get on the trail and start walking. After all, that's why they built it.
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