Happy Treasure Hunting!

North of there, the main state highway creeps up the floor of the valley. The mountains coverge to a narrowing but still wide approach to the pass. Five miles of gentle winding take you to the summit of Poncha Pass, as you head straight towards some of the highest mountains in the state.


On the other side, the highway drops down much quicker, in tighter curves, and in less than twenty minutes you are down in the valley of the Arkansas, near its headquarters.

There at Salida I intersected with the course of my 2009 trip, when I'd followed the Arkanasas upstream from near its mouth. I ate at the same Sonic Drive-In for fun, then took the road downstream this time in ghte tight canyon, all the way to Canyon City, where I needed to fill up with gas, at the first station I saw, right next to the prison.

Then with a new full tank I went back up the canyon a few miles, past the cutoff to Royal Gorge, and took State Highway 9 north, and then took the little couinty road cutoff through the hills to Cripple Creek.

I got into town in the late afternoon. The sky was menacing and looked of snow. Nasty clouds roiled above me.

I walked the main street for a half hour in the chill fresh air. There wasn't much to do there if you didn't want to go inside and gamble in any of the casinos. But the outside was a decient architectural tour of buildings from the 1890s, mostly, when the town was most active in the early days of its Gold Rush.

The gold field itself is amazing. It was one of the largest in North America. Ironically it was discovered during the first Colorado Gold Rush, that produced most of the early lore of the state during its territorial days. It came decades later, but turned out to be a much larger field. It sustained the coffers of the state for many decades around the turn of the Twentieth Century.

There is a still an active gold mine nearby. One passes it on the way to Victor,  the small town just south of Cripple Creek, on a spur of the highway, going down the mountains along the gulch. It's evidently still a working class town, where some of the gold miners live. It had a forlorn ghostly feel. My kind of place.

The only road out of Victor is back through Cripple Creek. It gave me a chance to inspect the gold mining operation there a second time.

I've thought it funny how the first explorations by Europens of the New World, at least the round that started at the end of the Middle Ages, was inspired initially in large part by a search for gold. Ironically one could have given simple directions that any of the early explorers from the days of Columbus could have used to find  the massive Cripple Creek gold field.

It would have gone something like this: Follow the Great Water northward many days, past its wide tributary, to the Muddy River. Follow it upstream westward for many days until you reach the Great Flat River. Follow it west across the arid plains. Take its southern fork to the base of the High Mountains. From the base of these mountains you will see the Great Peak. The gold you seek is behind this peak, about fifteen miles to the southwest, in rolling pastures at the top of a gulch that drains to the south.

I'm pretty sure LaSalle could have followed those directions.