I recently had an opportunity to have all 4 of my young grandkids at my house, and besides playing with their fathers' old toys from the 70's and 80's...
...we also explored a nearby attraction that we had never visited, the Jurassic Gardens, a permanent, non-traveling animatronic dinosaur museum, which is part of the Volo Auto Museum offerings.
Have you ever been shocked at learning something about one of your parents that completely surprised you? Something you could never have imagined them having done? Decades after my father's death, I was astonished when I discovered some black and white photos from the 1930s that revealed a side of my father that I never would have imagined, something that he had never talked about.
In the late 1930s, my dad visited his cousin Jake Jauch in Colorado where Jake was a U.S. Forest Ranger stationed in what is now the Uncompahgre Wilderness Area. Before that, it had been called the Big Blue Wilderness because it encompassed the Big Blue River watershed. Of course, in the 1930s there were no designated wilderness areas yet, so it was simply the Uncompahgre National Forest, located five miles northwest of the quaint Colorado town of Lake City and ten miles east of Ouray, with elevations ranging from 8400 feet to 14,309 feet. Uncompahgre, a name given by the Ute Indians, has been translated variously as "red water spring" and "hot water." In fact, a public hot springs pool still exists in Ouray. The area is also known as the "Switzerland of America," and several decades ago, my family hosted a foreign exchange student, Luca, from Carpi, Italy, which is in the extreme northern part of Italy near Switzerland. Luca, upon seeing this area of Colorado, remarked that it did indeed resemble the Alps of Switzerland.
Uncompahgre Peak (14,309 feet) is seen in the photo below with its unusual broad, flat, slightly tilted summit which falls away almost vertically on three sides as much as 1500 feet, a landmark visible from far away.
Its fourth side slopes gently and is inviting to many hikers, and views from atop Uncompahgre Peak display a vast wilderness of towering rock castles and sweeping ridges that form some of the finest scenery in the state as seen in these photos I took from the top and featuring the nearby predominant peaks of Wetterhorn (14,015 feet) and Matterhorn (13,546.) These two Swiss names recount the area's "Switzerland of America" nickname.
Back to my story about Dad's visit in the 1930s. Jake and his wife, Elma, lived in this Forest Service cabin and horse barn...
Back to the 1930s now. Jake took Dad to the top of Uncompahgre Peak on horseback. I'm not sure how far the horses were able to go back then, but the trail to the top back then was probably still solid ground. Here's a shot of Dad and Jake as they began their trip from the cabin. As the local ranger, one of Jake's jobs was to go the the top and change out the sign-in sheets signed by those who had scaled the peak. All 54 of Colorado's 14'ers (peaks of 14,000 feet or more altitude) have cylindrical metal tubes with forms inside for visitors to sign when they achieve the summit. The entire top of this mountain is now friable so all visitors have to hike to the top -- there is no way to climb the sides due to the disintegrating rock. I wonder if Dad signed the sheet since he was up there? Len and I did!
Going up on horseback wasn't possible in 1993 when I backpacked here because the upper 1/2 mile of the peak trail was all loose rock that had broken apart as seen in this photo as we scrambled up the talus slope. Here's Len relaxing on the loose rock...
