Carson Ghost Town

Some places call us repeatedly to return. For most of my family Lake City, Colorado, is such a place, starting with our grandparents in the late 1940s. 

The ghost town of Carson, with timberline just above (Photos by Narca)

Not too far from Lake City are the ruins of Carson, the ghost of a mining town that once thrived high in the San Juan Mountains, slightly below the Continental Divide. A miner, Christopher Carson, staked claim to the Bonanza King in 1881, and within a few years a town of 400 to 500 hardy souls had sprung up. The town's establishments included a livery stable, hotel and restaurants. Gold and silver briefly flowed, but winters proved too difficult, silver was devalued in 1893, and the town declined to extinction after the early 1900s. Its sheer inaccessibility presented a huge challenge to would-be residents.

Stampede to Timberline, Muriel Wolle's fascinating account of Colorado ghost towns, notes that Carson was built on an iron dike and therefore attracted far more than its fair share of lightning strikes!

Clumps of Mertensia are beautiful against the weathered gray wood.

Today, Carson is one of the best-preserved of Colorado's old mining camps, thanks to funding provided in large part by the federal government. New metal roofs have halted the disintegration of many of the cabins.

Yellow-bellied Marmots inhabit Carson today, as they no doubt did 100 years ago.

Beyond Carson, the wild San Juan Mountains beckon.

My grandparents spent most of their summers in Lake City, and the trip to Carson was a familiar one. Back then, the tiny town dump still held treasures of old purpled glass. Then, as now, the road up Wager Gulch to Carson required high clearance and 4-wheel-drive. When you reach Carson, you step back in time, to the era of oldtime, hardrock mining. What stories must haunt these log and plank walls!

Bighorn Sheep are among the rarer mammals of the San Juans. This bachelor group was spotted by our friend Jim Shiflett, between Creede and Lake City, during our June trip.

Today the high country around Carson is as exhilarating as ever. Lynx prowl the area. In most summers, the high mountain meadows are thick with flowers and butterflies. This year, after the lack of winter snow, a few flowers bloom, but it's only a ghost of the normal display.

Scarlet Gilia blooming at Carson

One of the yellow alpine paintbrushes...

... and its rosy relative, both at Carson

The only butterfly much in evidence is the Arctic Blue. On this cool, rainy day, they are hunkered down on the big composites, and little else is flying.

Arctic Blue clings to a composite on this chilly day.

Beyond Carson stretches a mountain wilderness. The old jeep road over the divide at Carson and down into Lost Trail Creek has degenerated into a simple trail. Barely accessible even in the 1950s and 1960s, Lost Trail was a lure for fly fishermen, because it still held a healthy population of native Cutthroat Trout. Our family would occasionally plan a camping trip to this wilderness, where, for shelter, we erected our tent within the log walls of a fallen-down cabin.

Today, while the others explore the road to the divide to see what shape it's in now, I walk alone through the spruce forest, past beaver ponds, and past the ruins of this cabin-with-a-view, which is perched above Wager Gulch and the distant valley of the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River.

Clouds shroud the high peaks. I see no Lynx, but this American Red Squirrel charms. 

American Red Squirrels are a close relative of Douglas Squirrel from the Pacific Northwest and Mearns' Squirrel from Baja California.

The songs of Hermit and Swainson's Thrushes spiral around me. Drumming woodpeckers duel. Mountain Chickadees and warblers feed their young. Mountain air is sharp and scented. How good to be back in the San Juans!

The Big Blue

Big Blue ––a watershed flowing from Uncompahgre Peak to the Gunnison River––and the nearby Alpine Plateau score high on several points. For one, they offer about the levelest hiking anywhere in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. Count us in!

Big Blue Creek flows from Uncompahgre's northeastern flank

(Photos by Narca)

First Noel and I hike along Blue Creek, its meanders lined in willows. Quickly the trail enters the Uncompahgre Wilderness, more than 100,000 acres of forest and tundra. Here in the trail's lowest reaches, a Clark's Nutcracker scrutinizes our progress. Back near the trailhead, Alan finds a family of Red-naped Sapsuckers in the aspens. 

Clark's Nutcracker

Clouds begin to build very early today, and flowers and butterflies are unaccountably scarce––we see a few fritillaries and a sulphur or two. Finally, with lunch calling insistently, it is no tragedy when the rain drives us out.

Purplish Fritillary

Soon the rain lifts as we retrace our route along the narrow 11-mile road. Near the top of the pass another less-traveled road takes off to Alpine Plateau. It's time to explore!

Meadows and conifers intersperse at Alpine Plateau.

Flowers and butterflies pick up considerably at Alpine Plateau. Among the many, Noel identifies a Boisduval's Blue (a new species for me), and we find several Rocky Mountain Parnassians. A juvenile Pine Grosbeak is a highlight.

Boisduval's Blue (large for a blue)

Rocky Mountain Parnassian, a swallowtail relative

Reluctantly retracing our route, we traverse mixed conifer-sagebrush country before returning to Highway 149 and Lake City. Exploring has paid off, again!

Quest for the Grail

To find the Grail, that quarry of legend, a quest is essential. And Noel and I have quested, for years. (For Alan, it is more of a diversion from ice cream, not so much a quest.) We have sought our Grail––the Lustrous Copper––at Slate Peak in the Washington Cascades, in the high Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming––and right here at Engineer Pass in the San Juan Mountains, where today we return, with my brother Brandon and his family.

Noel at Engineer Pass, looking southwest (All photos by Narca)

From our vantage point at 12,800 feet, the air is thin and our footsteps slow. A wilderness of jasper-laced peaks and high rolling tundra billows beneath us. To the northeast jut the San Juan's crown jewels: Uncompahgre, the Matterhorn, the Wetterhorn. To the southwest are arrayed the San Miguels: Mt. Sneffels, Teakettle. A Golden Eagle soars over, on its own quest for Picas and Yellow-bellied Marmots.

A sentinel Pica in talus at Engineer

Such diversity of flowers emblazons the high country: Pink Elephants, Purple Fringe, a zillion composites, Skunk Cabbage, Parry's Primrose, paintbrush of many hues, geraniums, Monkshood, Delphinium, Colorado Columbine. Wouldn't a Grail butterfly be found here, wanton amid the flower fields? Actually, no.

Trail across talus slope at 12,800 ft

We turn to the treacherous talus slides, and I find a nearly-level trail that crosses one. Soon one of Noel's lesser prizes appears, a Rockslide Checkerspot, and he is setting up to photograph it, when I call out "Lustrous Copper!" (Uh-oh: dilemma.) Within about a half-hour, we've found at least nine of the beauteous coppers scattered about the talus trail.

Rockslide Checkerspot at Engineer Pass

Male Lustrous Copper

Two views of a female Lustrous Copper

Next my nephew Torin (in a miraculous visual feat) spots a fox, and then another, probably denning in some crevice beneath the huge boulders that tumbled into the talus slope. They are Red Foxes, but of a very unusual melanistic coloring. The first is a variant known as a Silver Fox, all slaty-silver with a white tail tip.

Silver Fox in the boulder fields

The second is a Cross Fox, with big blonde patches contrasting with blacks and grays. From this great distance, I can only manage poorer-quality photos, but here they are. No doubt the foxes are raising their kits on Picas, which are abundant in the rockfields.

Cross Fox at Engineer Pass

When we are nearly back to the jeeps, Brandon's sweetheart Aimee finds this exquisite butterfly:

Milbert's Tortoiseshell in the San Juan Mountains

Back to the Lustrous Copper... how does one celebrate this pinnacle of achievement, this finding of the Grail? Why, with ice cream. Of course.

Copper Tales

Last week Alan and I set off for Lake City in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, on a butterfly expedition with our good friend Noel Snyder. For two years, Noel has been daydreaming of Tailed Coppers, ever since I found them along Henson Creek on an earlier trip. So, naturally, the first day found us exploring Henson Creek in search of Tailed Coppers and their flighty relatives. And coppers we found!

Two views of a Tailed Copper

Mixed in with the Tailed and Ruddy Coppers were quite a few Coral Hairstreaks, a species I had only seen previously in Missouri.

Coral Hairstreak on composite

Most were nectaring at composites, which flourished along the roadside with Colorado Columbine, wild rose, geraniums, and the familiar, wonderful Common Fireweed, its soft purple blossoms blending so beautifully with the blue-green of its foliage.

Henson Creek originates in the 13- and 14,000-foot peaks of the San Juans, and rushes down to join the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. Here I spent many months of my childhood, in this quintessential country of the high Rocky Mountains. The main changes in the intervening decades have been the level of use for recreation––now very high indeed!––and the proliferation of second homes, where once only wild strawberries cloaked the hillsides. Returning here is bittersweet. But masses of flowers still riot in the high country, chipmunks scamper away at every bend of the road, Prairie Falcons still hunt the tundra, and Uncompahgre is still lord of the high peaks of southwestern Colorado.

Common Fireweed

(All photos by Narca)

And, yes, the old-fashioned soda fountain still operates in the town of Lake City, and though it now is a gift store rather than a general store, the ice cream remains outstanding. My grandfather being partial to ice cream, we often stopped here in the 1950s and 1960s for chocolate milk shakes after an evening of boisterous square dancing or an exhilarating day of jeeping or fly-fishing.

Pity Alan and Noel! They are about to be subjected to endless tales of mother lodes and miner's lore, of Lynx and Mountain Sheep, of our inner-tubing club––the Blue-bottomed Butt-busters––with its initiation rite of a 10-mile tubing trip in the icy waters of the Lake Fork of the Gunnison. The Lake Fork has a chance to warm up ever-so-slightly, because its waters are held in the natural lake of San Cristobal. First innner-tubers adjust to that, then when Henson Creek converges with the Lake Fork, they are slammed with another icy blast as the water temperature drops even further, to 52º! Yes, Lake City....

Tomorrow we seek our long-sought-after grail butterfly, the Lustrous Copper!