My Jeep is powering up a hill in the San Juan Mountains
several miles outside of Telluride. The headlights cut through the
darkness of the four-wheel drive road in front of me and I admire
how this drive couldn’t be more of a contrast from my usual commute
to Denver. This is exactly why I’m here for my summer vacation.
I maneuver through a switchback where a truck squeezes
alongside my Jeep. It’s strange, in the past I’ve never seen another
soul driving up here before dawn. As the truck passes I see its bed
is filled with tripods, orange vests and surveying lenses.
I summit the hill where I see the Alta ghost town, a group of splintery
wooden buildings that surprisingly still stand after being built in
such a harsh climate more than one hundred years ago. However,
something else is different on this visit. There are now fences with
“private property” signs circling the buildings, there are survey
stakes delineating invisible boundaries along the road and some of
the structures are strung with yellow “caution” tape. These aren’t
the sort of things that evoke the feeling that you are trudging into
the inaccessible remoteness of what was once a booming mining camp.
I park the Jeep and set up my own tripod outside. I reach for
my camera bag to pull out my Nikon and place it on the tripod. I
choose a wide-angle lens and peer through the viewfinder to compose
a shot of what was once a boarding house with X-shaped walls and a
window that frames the distant Wilson Peak – a mountain with its own
recent history of private property struggles according to friends
who like to climb fourteeners and are miffed about having to pay
access fees to climb there. The sun rises and illuminates the cracks
in the building’s textured façade. The snowy slopes of Wilson Peak
shine in a pink alpenglow. I click the shutter and preserve a record
of my visit.
After I photograph Alta I continue driving
toward Gold King Basin nearby. The basin doesn’t have the cascading
waterfalls of other nature photography hot spots like Yankee Boy
Basin near Ouray or the jagged peaks that surround the meadows of
Crested Butte, but it doesn’t have the crowds of those places
either. What the basin shares with the other more popular
destinations is a spectrum of wildflowers from the scarlet reds of
paintbrush to the yellows of arnica and the indigos of columbine.
Maybe no other place in the state has such a concentration of color.
Like Alta, the basin isn’t exempt from signs of civilization.
Years ago someone built a house along a lake at the basin’s base. I
imagine that if the inhabitants want to stay there during the winter
they’d be buried in snow for months but I can’t blame them for
wanting to have such a spectacular backyard bouquet of flowers to
themselves in the summer. Despite my sympathy for the homeowner I
grow more aggravated that I’ll have to hide the house behind a
boulder in my viewfinder or have to Photoshop it out of my photos
when I get home.
I return to Telluride in the afternoon where I pick up a
newspaper. On the front page there is a story detailing the Town of
Mountain Village’s plans to possibly annex the Alta area and build
more than seventy homes, fifty cabins and a lodge close to the ghost
town. The story didn’t say what would become of Gold King Basin, but
it doesn’t take much to surmise that development would eventually
spread there too if the annexation is approved. No more wildflowers.
I have plans to visit Alta again this summer. I never know
when it might be the last chance I have to see it before it is
surrounded by modern cabins. I’m not the only one who likes to drive
on four-wheel drive roads through ghost towns and flower-filled
basins. Places like Alta and Gold King Basin don’t stay a secret for
long.
