Narrow Gauge

We parked on the verge and walked out into the field until we found the tracks. There’s no marker for this and no path to it; I’d read about the old grade while planning the trip and had directions rough enough that finding it was still a matter of wandering around a meadow looking at the ground. The road we’d come in on seemed to run down to a campground and had a steady stream of traffic on it, none of which stopped.

What’s left is two short pieces of track, one straight and one curved. I shot the curved one.

This was the last stop of a very long day — we’d been up since half past one for the Maroon Bells, crossed Independence Pass at lunchtime, and were working our way toward Denver. The sunset we got was restrained rather than spectacular. The high cloud stayed grey and did nothing, but the low stuff caught the light and went bright orange and pink for a while, which was more than enough for what I wanted.

The Denver, South Park and Pacific ran over this pass, the first rail connection between Denver and the mining camps in South Park. I have no first-hand memory of any of that, obviously. What I’ve got instead is everything I read and watched growing up about the West — the adventure and the pioneering and all of it — and a piece of rusted curve lying in a Colorado meadow is about as direct a line back to that as I’m going to find. It’s why this one matters to me more than it probably should.