High atop the Continental Divide, near Monarch Pass, on the eastern margin of the Upper Gunnison Basin, are the prehistoric remains of an intriguing and innovative hunting method employed by ancient tribes. The Monarch Pass Game Drive was an ingenious system of low boulder walls, hunting blinds and ambush pits designed to lure big game …
By Mike Rosso For many years, I’ve driven right past this popular tourist attraction on top of Monarch Pass, but have never stopped in the gift shop or ridden the tram. This morning I took advantage of some relatively clear weather to visit and learn about the Monarch Crest Giftshop and Tramway, the highest commercial …
Back in the mid-1950s, Salida entrepreneur Elmo Bevington, and former Gunnison Sheriff George Cope, leased land on the top of Monarch Pass from the United States Forest Service (USFS) to construct a gift shop and restaurant. It was completed in 1954. Bevington then decided to develop an old trail near the building site which went …
By Mike Rosso
I recently returned home from celebrating my Mom’s 91st birthday (Dad is 96). Most of my family, me being the exception, have settled in Sonoma County, California. It’s a truly stunning countryside there. Rolling hills of grass and stately oaks. Miles and miles of vineyards stretching above and beyond the horizon.
By Martha Quillen
Mention America’s Great Divide today and most people will think of the partisan divisions growing between Trump supporters and critics, blacks and whites, men and women, and other political rivals. But when I first moved to Colorado the most talked-about Great Divide was the geographic barrier that divided rivers flowing east from rivers flowing west.
By Frani Halperin, H2O Radio
Glenn and Kim Schryver are the nicest people you could ever meet. The kind of people you’d love to have as neighbors – considerate, handy, friendly, and funny. Only, if you lived next-door to them, your driveway would be four miles long through a narrow tunnel barely wide enough to fit a car – and one that actively carries water. Glenn and Kim are the caretakers of Grizzly Reservoir, just east of Aspen, and the tunnel is, for many months of the year, their only link to civilization.
By Peter Anderson
I must have missed one of the rock cairns that marked the trail and walked off the map, but I did find a fine camp in an alpine meadow, with an island of spruce shielding me from elk grazing the waning tundra sun in a snow-rimmed cirque a mile or so off toward the Continental Divide. If my inner compass was a little off, so what? This was a fine place to be lost. As the elk herd approached, a slight breeze came with them, floating my scent off toward the sun which had gone down behind a distant ridge. As far as they were concerned I wasn’t there. Even when the walls of my tent billowed out in an occasional puff of wind, I didn’t exist. So they came closer and closer and soon I could hear the cows and calves mewing and bleating to one another on the far side of the spruce.
I’ve been trying to figure out how and where Central Colorado – the region served (and somewhat created) by this magazine – fits into last month’s topic, “Great Divide” political geography. The Great Divide being not the physical Continental Divide but the demographic metropolitan-nonmetropolitan divide, a major factor in the 2016 election.