An eclectic group of cyclists converged at the confluence of the Dolores and San Miguel rivers
Two towns on the West End of the Uncompaghre Plateau are absolutely worth visiting. Nucla and Naturita are a mere five miles apart but offer two very distinct versions of how to cling to existence on the edge of the desert, far from anything that relates to hustle and bustle.
The first thing you notice is that your phone doesn’t work anymore. Anywhere. Now it’s just a camera and music source. That took a day and a half to get used to. Locals don’t seem to mind.
Nucla has been there longer than Naturita, and it feels that way. The houses and farms resemble something you’d find in Kansas much more than the Four Corners. Farming and ranching require a more sedentary pace of life, going in for the long term. There is one restaurant in the downtown core because that’s all they need.
Naturita chases the next big thing so there are many more worn out buildings that started as grand visions and are now waiting for the successive entrepreneur to revitalize the spirit of adventure, and harness the next boom wave. First a trading post on the San Miguel river, then a mining town, now the inspiration is to make a bike and adventure destination out of it, similar to Moab and Fruita, without the access and intrusion of an interstate.
The farms and ranches around Nucla continue to slowly grow their foothold upon the land, irrigating places that only see rain a few times a year, breathing life into soils and systems that haven’t seen a crop since the Ancient Ones, known as the Anasazi, planted them in the 800-1200’s.
Naturita and Norwood have a new energy bubbling up in them as they fill with inhabitants not satisfied with the monied places we know so well, wanting a slower pace without losing access to certain amenities. The new populace, primarily young people, is figuring out how to reinvent themselves in smaller communities with ties to environmental concepts, organic foods, and a connection to the natural world.
The whole area has miles of old mining roads that the uranium prospectors conveniently left behind after they poked and prodded every inch of non-farmable land, looking for the new age energy source that would unlock the next wave of American ingenuity. They came, they saw, they pillaged. The companies took what they wanted, and left. They left an entire town, abandoned.
In 2020, a new visionary discovered the town of Vancorum sitting patiently, slowly collapsing back into the desert plateaus on which it was erected. They took the infrastructure already there, rebuilt the houses, laid out the foundations for rv’s, glamping tents, reconditioned Airstream trailers, breathing life into it, providing a basecamp for a contemporary breed of explorer. Camp V was the celebration dinner host for the West End Gravel Rush.
So, on an 1817 invention, updated to the latest possible level, we traversed back and forth between aeons and ideas, taking in vistas and landscapes perpetually altered by mines and waterways. Human and nature peering at each other and discovering how to coexist, even if for only the briefest of moments, adding our energy to the universal flow of all.
Cheers.
