A Creek Runs through It

By Chuck Smythe

In eastern Colorado, the Continental Divide makes a great sweep to the East at 40 degrees latitude, where Arapahoe Peak towers only thirty miles from the Great Plains. This bend funnels the great westerly winds, which pile up there and fall over a mile to the prairie, picking up speed as they drop. The ghost town of Caribou, which I visited in our recent story “Snow Hiking in Colorado High Country,” is just below Arapahoe Peak, and the wind howls through town like a Banshee much of the winter.

    In the fall of 1864, the Colorado gold rush was in full boom. George Conger, a local miner, went deer hunting up near Arapahoe Peak. There he collected some odd-looking rocks, which he tossed in a drawer. Five years later he noticed that these rocks looked much like the silver ore from Nevada’s famous Comstock Lode, so he showed them to William Martin and Hugh McCammon, two experienced miners from the Central City gold camp. They made a grubstake deal and set out to find the mother lode. Eventually they bushwhacked up Coon Trail Creek, west of the Nederland mining camp, and found the lode on a wind-blasted hill just below the Continental Divide. They spent the winter sitting on top of their claim, but word got out, and the next year hundreds of miners poured into what became the Caribou Lode, one of the earliest and richest silver strikes in Colorado.

Cardinal Camp, circa 1910

    It must have been a harsh life up there, but the City Fathers wanted it to be a clean, respectable town, so they ran all the harlots and gamblers out. All these Essential Workers moved a few miles down Coon Trail Creek to Cardinal Camp, which became the red light district. It also had a big ore mill, so when the short-lived Switzerland Trail narrow gauge railroad was built, it stopped at Cardinal – to the great annoyance of the Caribou City Fathers.

Cardinal, a ghost town, circa 1911

    Sic transit gloria mundi. The great silver crash of the 1880s closed the mine. It reopened for a while as one of America’s first tungsten mines, but by 1919 the towns were abandoned, and only a scattering of cabins were left to molder.

Enter yours truly, stage left. In 1975 I was divorced and broke, looking for a way to live cheaply without living ugly while I rebuilt my fortunes. In those days many hippies were moving into those old cabins, attracted by the cheap rent, spectacular scenery, and romantically rough lifestyle. Sounded good to me. I got a couple of log hovels in Cardinal, in a pretty meadow on the banks of Coon Trail Creek. I rented the spare cabin to a pair of ski bums, and settled down to learn to live like my grandfather.

Around Boulder, 1970s

Syllabus for Mountain Hippy 101:
    Learn to fell a tree for firewood without dropping it on your head or your pickup. Learn how to sharpen your chain saw, and how not to cut your leg off with it (personally, I’d rather pet a rattlesnake).
    Learn how to install a safe stove chimney. Clean the creosote out regularly so you don’t burn the place down. (The local firewood is particularly bad that way.) Learn to split wood with a maul and wedges, and learn how to not chop off toes doing it. (Splitting wood is surprisingly fun. Half an hour of light work will heat your home for a week.)
    Locate a nearby spring for drinking water and have it tested. Get used to hauling ten gallons of water from the creek every day for washing.
    Learn to work a wood-burning kitchen stove. (I did bread and turkey that way!) Learn about efficient heating stoves. Textbook by Benjamin Franklin (who did not invent the “Franklin Stove”; he used much better technology).
    Learn to chain up your pickup. Learn what days to not even try to drive to town, and make a deal with your boss. Get real good at driving on ice.
    The easy parts: you don’t have to grow your own food. Grocery store five miles away. Same for the laundromat and the hardware. And you get to use a chain saw and a pickup; the work is many times harder without them, as I learned in childhood.

Life on these terms was less comfortable than in the ’burbs, but not bad. Seriously hard work was just a few days in the fall, getting in the firewood. This is in good times. In bad times...I was once in bed with tick fever, and had to use the outhouse in a midnight blizzard. This wasn’t so romantic. Once I had stitches in my forearm and couldn’t chop wood for a few weeks. I learned very quickly to help my neighbors whenever I could; we badly needed each other at times.
    These neighbors are a story in themselves. They were a much tougher, more practical lot than your average street hippy. The weaklings left town after the second big fall wind storm. Those who remained included Chip and Peggy, newlyweds, stuffing butts into chairlifts up at the ski area, pounding nails, cooking in the bar.
    Andy, discharged from the Navy for trying to organize a serviceman’s union. Tried to get the mayor of San Diego busted for corruption, and ran to Colorado after the cops shot up his house. Pounded nails while learning professional fly fishing, and eventually moved up to the Bitterroot as a guide. He was my closest friend in those days.
    Let’s see...a coke dealer who often had parties attended by local politicians. Newlyweds trying to make it building heating stoves out of oil drums. An architecture student. A history grad student. A girl who made packs for Hine Snowbridge. Her husband, a good guy who sincerely believed he could convince me that evolution was a fake.
    I owned the neighborhood pond, and Andy had the sauna/shower. I moved in on July 4th, during a town party, and met the whole neighborhood in the sauna, nekkid. Good folks, these. They took me in like a brother, and gave me a happy second childhood.

Just a few years before, Frode Stordahl, a young professor from Norway, had introduced many of us to cross country skiing. In those days we had the woods to ourselves. We’d ski uncut powder uphill all morning, then zip down in our own tracks in the afternoon. In Cardinal this became an institution. Head for the hills Saturday morning and ski till we drop. In the evening, “I’ll fire up the sauna. You chop a hole in the ice at the pond for the cold cycle. You heat some shower water. You start some burritos. And you roll some weed.” And we’d party the night away. The next morning we’d all go up to the Sundance Inn, on a ridgetop with a majestic view of the Divide, where the ladies of the community would serve up breakfast fit for a king. These breakfasts were memorialized by George Blevins, an old civil rights warrior who is still the town cartoonist.

Grateful to George Blevins for this perfect cartoon

    I also took up hill running in those days. A childhood bout with polio had left me weak and clumsy. Gerry Roach, a grad school friend who’d become a world class mountaineer, taught me how to train on mountains, and within a year or so I was a slow but solid marathoner – and a decent mountaineer, which I remained until age caught me a few years ago. Spending whole days running mile after mile through alpine meadows was one of the best things I ever did.

One day a young fugitive from federal justice over the Wounded Knee Incident arrived in Cardinal. The community protected him until he moved on. At one point he disappeared for a few days, so Andy asked a lawyer freak to make sure he wasn’t in jail. This was Nancy, who had recently fled Washington DC for her mental health, after Tricky Dick’s arrest of a whole stadium full of war protesters. She was a piece of work. She became a cook at the Pioneer Inn, the local biker bar. One evening a fight started, as usual in such places. A biker started beating on Nancy’s boyfriend, so she waded in with a meat cleaver and emptied the place. I’m glad to say that when I saw her last she was headed to New Mexico with a fresh nursing degree. The hymn of the Pioneer Inn was “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers,” by the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

    That town had a lot of good music. Two miles north of Cardinal was the Caribou Rock & Roll Ranch, bought by Jim Guercio, a rock entrepreneur who built a big recording studio there. Steven Stills was a well-known local, not the most popular. Guercio kept people out for the privacy of his clients, but I went running there anyway, confident I could head into the trees and outrun his security.

Eventually all this had to end, of course. I went off to winter at the South Pole, and when I returned most of my neighbors had dispersed to Montana or Alaska. Ironically, I’d spent all that extra money on real estate, and it had me too busy to commute. During the long polar winter, I’d made two promises to myself: I would get serious about music. I loved it far too much to keep screwing around. And I needed to go to climbing school so I could climb better mountains without dying like a fool. I spent the next twenty years fulfilling these promises. Life has gone on with new adventures, but still I often dream of lacing my sneakers once more and vanishing like a deer into the alpine meadows of Caribou.

Copyright © 2020 by Chuck Smythe