Kevin - Friday morning, 6 AM.
We are in Pueblo Colorado, just about ready to start hiking tomorrow. Tuesday was spent with last minute auto repairs, cold food packing, and finally, in the late afternoon, driving eastward out of Utah. The plan was to get away by 10 AM, but, well, that’s how things go.
Denny is driving the ‘sag wagon’ passenger car with the bikes and I’m pulling the RV with our truck. We are a small caravan compared to the original Battalion. Going uphill from Salt Lake City onto the Colorado Plateau takes a fair amount of gasoline.
Wednesday, we pushed for 14 hours, arriving at Lake Pueblo State Park about 10:30 at night. We set the trailer and got in bed just about midnight. There were so many places I’d have liked to have stopped to photo or talk to locals about particular aspects of the early frontier days. The schedule just didn’t permit it.
The Lake Pueblo State Park is very nice. There’s a dam which impounds a large reservoir (Lake Pueblo) with two large camping areas. There’s also a marina for boating. It gets pretty windy what with the surrounding rocks heating up and the cool water creating the right conditions for sailing.
Thursday morning we worked some RV issues. If you’ve ever owned an RV, you will appreciate the gravity of that brief comment. If not, then … save yourself!
At the downtown Pueblo museum, we asked to arrange a photo session at the archeological dig which found the original el pueblo settlement. Truth be told, it wasn’t a military ‘fort’, so I try to avoid calling it ‘Fort Pueblo.’ The inhabitants that built if just referred to it as ‘el pueblo’ – ‘the house’ or some other shade of Spanish meaning. No defensive towers or cannons like Bent’s trading post. Pueblo was just a simple adobe square patterned after all the other Hispanic settlements in ‘Nuevo Mexico.’ The residents relied upon good trading relations with the tribes in the area to protect them and it did for a number of years – until it didn’t. That’s another story.
Thursday afternoon, I was keen to examine some landforms that the 1845 South Pass Expedition topographers commented on. As the dragoons under Colonel Kearny came down into the Arkansas River valley, they noted a fair number of cone shaped hills. Sizes ranged from 6 feet to upwards of 30 feet high. The topographers – trained in the geology known in their day – were puzzled by these cone hills and couldn’t arrive at an explanation. After another 175 years of geologic science discoveries, we can now explain these odd hills. And THAT’s another story, too.
Locating these cone hills helped me interpret Kearny’s 1845 route which missed el pueblo by about 5 miles. The settlement was there but for some reason, Kearny decided to bypass it. To date, I’ve not found an explanation for this. It seems very odd. Any suggestions or historic quotes would be greatly appreciated.
After our brief geology field trip, we did some shopping, more repairs, then dinner and a lot of preparation for Saturday and Sundays events. We will gather at the Runyon Field Mormon Battalion marker starting at 8 AM Saturday. We will ‘enlist’ those attending, then ‘step off’ with a 5-mile hike up the east side hike/bike path along Fountain Creek.
Sunday evening at 6 PM we will present a ‘fireside’ at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 4720 Surfwood Lane, Pueblo.
