Lovely, laid-back, languid Chaffee County

Hey, look who's joined me here in Colorado!

After her epic eastern journey and my high Sierra mountain climbs in California Betsy and I rendezvoused in the well-named south-central Colorado town of Buena Vista where we have ratcheted things down several notches and settled into a more relaxed “Colorado Mountain Time”.

I stumbled on Buena Vista and Chaffee County back in 2012 when I used it as my home base for climbing the Colorado 14ers. Betsy visited for several weeks during that summer and we both became rather attached to the place. This is the second time we have returned since 2012 and each time we have stayed in our travel trailer at the Snowy Peaks RV Park about two miles north of the only stop light in Buena Vista (often pronounced buuna vista, or simply called buunee or BV).

14ers Mt. Antero (left) and Mt. Princeton

The town sits in the middle of the Arkansas River Valley, which is roughly 100 miles from north to south and 50 miles across, from the Mosquito Mountains on the east to the towering Sawatch Mountains on the west that are home to 15 14ers and form the Continental Divide.

Attentive blog readers may be interested to know that sawatch (pronounced soo-watch) is a Ute Indian word that means blue earth! Ho, ho, ho!! (Betsy says the "joke" here is to ephemeral and needs explanation...so...Jolly Green Giant-Blue Earth, MN-Ho,ho,ho Green Giant! from the 1960s television commercials...get it?).

Although the precise boundary was not clear at the time, the Arkansas Valley was on the western edge of the Louisiana Purchase and Zebulon Pike came through here on an exploratory trip in the winter of 1806 when he mistook the Arkansas River for the Red River. Pike and his fellow explorers nearly froze to death in a Christmas Day snowstorm near present-day Salida. After the 1836 Texas Revolution the nation of Texas claimed the valley and Sawatch Mountains and continued that claim after statehood in 1845. The matter was not definitively settled until the Compromise of 1850, when the Texas border was trimmed back to its present configuration.

One of the more important events in the Valley's history was the discovery of gold near Leadville in 1860. While it never amounted to much it brought lots of settlers, cemented the final displacement of the Utes to reservations and led to other mining activities in the late 19^th century that were more realistic than gold. Many of the buildings in the valley’s three cities date to the late 1800s and early 1900s, the heydays for both mining and ranching and Salida has a nice collection of these structures in its historic downtown along with a well-maintained and well-used Carnegie library.

Leadville (pop. 2,602), the county seat of Lake County, is on the north end of the valley near the headwaters of the Arkansas River. At 10,430 feet Leadville is the highest incorporated city in the U.S.

The Arkansas River, near BV.

U.S. 24 runs down the middle of the valley, paralleling the river. Buena Vista (pop. 2,617, elevation 8,000), which was the county seat of Chaffee County until 1928, is 35 miles south of Leadville.

Salida (pop. 5,236, elevation 7,000) is now the county seat of Chaffee County and the largest city in the valley. Salida is 25 miles south of Buena Vista. While Salida may have a lower elevation than either Leadville or Buena Vista it also has three marijuana dispensaries and, thus, has a legitimate claim to being called Colorado’s “highest” city.

All three of the cities in the valley have their roots in the mining industry but that has, for the most part, disappeared and been replaced by tourism. There are however hundreds of miles of old mining roads and trails in the foothills, mountains and national forests and ATVing is a popular pastime in addition to rafting, kayaking, hiking and camping. While there are still some large cattle ranches operating in the valley there has been a lot of subdividing into acreage home sites and many of the water rights that once supported ranching activities have been sold to the cities.

Chaffee County has a population of just over 18,000 spread out over 1,000 square miles. By comparison, Bexar County has more than 1.8 million people in 1,240 square miles. The population of Chaffee County has increased some in recent years, but the growth is much slower than the state as a whole.

Chaffee County is also very white and very old, compared to the rest of the state and certainly compared to an urban area in Texas, like Bexar County. Eighty-five percent of the population is White, 10 percent is Hispanic and less than two percent is Black. More than one in five residents is 65 or older while only 16 percent is 18 and under.

Party time at Snowy Peaks RV Park.

Here at the Snowy Peaks RV Park folks are even whiter and older than the locals. The park attracts a lot of Texans along with a fair amount of Coloradans from the front range cities. A sprinkling of Kansans, Missourians and Oklahomans round out the clientele. Oddly, I don’t recall seeing anyone from Arkansas here in the Arkansas Valley.

A Sawatch sunset from our home at Snowy Peaks RV Park in Buena Vista.

K's burger joint in BV is just one of the town's many fine dining venues.

One of our favorite things to do in the late afternoon/early evening is drive down an abandoned railroad right-of-way on the east side of the river. It's about a 15-mile drive on a flat, dirt road that ends up in downtown BV and passes through a series of short tunnels. Check out the video of Betsy driving through the tunnel.


Given the hippy-like vibe of Salida I was a bit surprised to find that Chaffee County is significantly more Republican-leaning than the state as a whole. Statewide President Obama out-polled Mitt Romney by more than five percentage points in 2012 but received just 18 votes more than Romney in Chaffee County. In the 2014 senate race Republican Cory Gardner beat incumbent Democrat Mark Udall by about 2.5 percentage points statewide but out-polled Udall by 4.2 points in Chaffee County. Perhaps the Democrats were too stoned to remember to mail in their ballots (Colorado used an all-mail ballot in the 2014 election)?

When the weather is good and the mood strikes me I am continuing to re-hike some of my favorite 14ers, adding Mt. Harvard and Mt. Huron to the three 14er summits described in previous posts.

With many great views of "The Three Apostles" the hike to Mt. Huron is one of the prettiest and easiest routes to a 14er summit in the U.S.

Check out this video of my encounter with a mountain goat on the Mt. Harvard hike (and note that, although I am on the slopes of Mt. Harvard the mountain in prominent view in the background is Mt. Yale).

While I have been climbing an occasional 14er Betsy has been riding her bike into town to do grocery shopping and purchase a Denver Post; and she has been hiking the Midland Trail in the hills just east of town.

Betsy's view of BV from the Midland Trail.

Over the Labor Day weekend we traveled 100 miles or so to the "ranch" of a college friend Julie and her husband Randy in the Wet Mountains southwest of Pueblo. This is basically an acreage lot subdivision that has a mix of vacation and full-time homes. The mix of "residents" is similar to Snowy Peaks, but with a lot more money and spread out over a much larger area. 

On Sunday there was a big potluck affair that we attended and we did a bit of hiking and ATVing. It was a fun and relaxing weekend.

The potluck crowd helped an ailing neighbor attend the annual event that was hosted by, naturally, a Texan.

Julie and Randy's "vacation barn".

 

Maybe you can't see all the way to Kansas from the Wet Mountains, but maybe you can?

On Labor Day Monday we attended the last Colorado Springs Sky Sox game of the year and Betsy snagged another mascot photo, this time with the impetuous Foxy Sox! By the looks of it she may have gotten more than she bargained for?

 

The Aspen leaves have not changed (much) yet but temperatures are dropping into the 40s at night and there has been a dusting of snow on the mountain tops in recent days. Fall is not far off.

For the remainder of the month we have plans to do some traveling away from BV, to visit friends and attend events. We’ll likely be reporting on those travels in future posts. 

We are planning to leave BV for Texas on September 30.