< PREVIOUS ] [ 1987 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
The talk has started to turn serious about forming a state park along at least 100 mountain miles of the Arkansas River.
Right now, nobody seems to be in charge of coordinating recreation along the river. About 40 percent of the river's shoreline is administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management, which consequently collects some fees from raft outfitters because they use public land in a profit-making enterprise. The state government takes a regulatory interest in the rafting industry, as well as in fishing and wildlife. There are other federal agencies, like the Forest Service, as well as county governments, which have zoning laws.
So there is some merit in getting one agency, presumably the State Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation, to administer the river and to manage it for recreation.
There is also talk of reviving passenger service on what
was once the Denver & Rio Grande Western's main line --
the Scenic Line of the World
-- west from Pueblo
through the Royal Gorge, north up the Arkansas past the
highest Rocky Mountains, through the tunnel at Tennessee
Pass, down the shadowy precipitous canyon of the Eagle
River, and along the Colorado River through Glenwood Canyon
to Glenwood Springs.
The counties along the route -- now used only by sporadic freight trains -- have engaged a consultant to look into a tourist train, and surprisingly, the Rio Grande has even expressed interest.
I like trains, and any management system along the crowded banks and rapids of the Arkansas would have to be an improvement. The local economy would perk up, because this valley would become a giant amusement park. Ride the scenic train. Ride the thrilling river. Ride the rented horses. Ride the jeeps to the top of Mount Antero. Ride into a sanitized fantasy where the gritty reality used to be pretty interesting.
The Arkansas River starts up near Leadville. As recently as the beginning of this decade, Leadville was still the classic western hard-rock mining town.
If you happened through the Cloud City and saw two burly, drunken men hollering insults and waving guns at each other, that was not a show for tourists, like those fake gunfights at Buckskin Joe by the Royal Gorge. A fight in Leadville was the Real Thing.
What you saw was also the Real Thing if you wandered into a bar on West Second Street, and noticed how the painted women therein would sashay upstairs with paying customers.
When commercial rafting began on the Arkansas River in the early 1970s, the sense of adventure was authentic. For several years, some whitewater navigators had argued that Brown's Canyon could not be rafted at all, let alone rafted commercially. If you ventured into those thundering rapids, you were confronting nature with little more than your wits.
Now the oarsman who takes you through Brown's Canyon has a schedule to meet, and the biggest risk you run is the bumper-to-bumper congestion of buses and trailers at Ruby Mountain and Hecla Junction. The force of the rushing water is increasingly determined by the calculated release of water from reservoirs upstream.
Tourist trains? Cleaner and safer, but definitely not as exciting as hopping a freight in Minturn, or hustling a ride in the locomotive cab on the C&S spur line from Leadville to Climax, or riding in the caboose of the limestone train that climbed from Salida over two switchbacks to the Monarch Quarry.
A rail excursion hereabouts just won't be the same if it becomes a tourist attraction. Whitewater rafting is already more of an amusement-park ride with designed thrills than it is an authentic confrontation with the unpredictable forces of nature. I,Leadville doesn't have much choice but to flaunt its gaudy and violent past by providing safe Hollywood versions of what was dangerous everyday reality not so long ago.
Would reality return if we don't get a state park along the river? No. Times, alas, have changed. The Arkansas -- the blue-collar, lunch-bucket river -- is turning into a playground. That being the case, the best we can hope for is that it will be run in a sensible way. So far, the proposed state park looks like the most sensible way
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1987 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >