Travel beneath the iconic Spanish Peaks on the Highway of Legends Scenic Byway. This loop will take you up into the mountains at 10,000 feet and down into the flat plains.You’ll drive through historic cities and towns, former mining camps, and even a few ghost towns.
You’ll find out about the ancient geologic changes that have formed the surrounding landscape over millennia. You’ll hear tales of the old West, with its covered wagon trains and gun battles.
You’ll also learn about the coal and steel production that built America… starting right here in Huerfano County. And – you’ll hear about the people who made it happen: coal miners, union laborers, and the mighty Mother Jones – the most dangerous grandmother in America. And of course, you’ll hear about the native people, and the lives they lived here. There’ll be legends, ghost stories, and even a few rumors. And finally – you’ll hear tips about local hikes, museums, and parks where you can stop to stretch your legs.
This audio tour is brought to you by the Huerfano Tourism Board, and made possible by a grant from the Colorado Tourism Office.
Sample Stories
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Cuchara
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Soon, you'll be driving through Cuchara village. The name means spoon in Spanish, and legend has it that this comes from the shape of the valley. This area was a summer home for native Ute people, escaping the heat of the plains.
In 1907, a doctor arrived here from Texas. He was in search of a place where his brother, ill with tuberculosis, could rest and recover. When he came to Cuchara, the doctor was so taken with the fresh air and mountain streams that he would dedicate himself to developing the area. He began a campaign to sell the area to those living below in the flatlands, calling it the Cuchara Camps. Over the years, tents became cabins, and then cabins became a village. People began to build further into the hills.
Legend has it that a young couple came here to build their home. They hired another man to help them, building the house and a woodshed. Soon the couple had a baby. The seasons began to change, and as the weather cooled, they filled the woodshed in preparation. After several winter months, they ran low on wood. A blizzard struck, and the husband went out to restock their wood supply. But... he never came back. As night began to fall, the wife was afraid to look for him. In the morning she went out to search with the hired man. They looked high and low, but there was no sign of her husband. The woman returned to the house to care for the baby, leaving the hired man to continue searching. But... he never came back, either! The woman was too terrified to leave her four walls and stayed in the house for the rest of the winter. Trying to keep from freezing to death, she burned everything she could: furniture, animal stalls, and finally the walls of the house itself. In the spring the nearby villagers found her, running into town with her baby and nothing else.
No one knows what happened to the men, and the house itself burned down in the 1950s. But you can still hike to the Haunted House meadow, where it once stood. Access the trail in Cuchara, near the Spring Creek Day Use Area.
New Elk Mine and Vigil
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As you continue ahead, you'll soon pass New Elk Mine, the last mine around here to close. Originally opened in the 1950s, it boasted a six-foot-thick coal seam, estimated to hold 80 million tons of coal. Over time, the mine also became a processing plant, washing and preparing the coal for shipping. Up ahead, you'll pass right under a large pipe that brought the refuse from the washed coal over the road to a dumpsite. You'll also see heaps of slag, or unusable mined rock, along the roadside.
As we drive, imagine the railroads stretching from here out west to California, and in the other direction, east to Pennsylvania and New York. And then, imagine the barbed wire that housed the cattle, a web across the west. Well, all that iron came from somewhere, and it all began here, in Huerfano County.
In 1872, the owner of the Denver and Rio Grande railway line thought he would do well to make his own rails. The company he founded, Colorado Fuel and Iron, became the largest steel and coal mining company in the American West. Coal from Souther Colorado mines travelled north by rail to a steel plant in the neighboring city of Pueblo. There, the coal fired up the blast furnaces. Iron ore from a nearby valley was forged into everything from nails to rails. It was those rails that would eventually connect the two coasts. The trains that would pass along the rails would change the picture of America's industry and trade forever. And remember - all of this was powered by Southern Colorado coal. Without it, America's development would have been very different.
But over time, the steel company that had driven so much of the mining industry found a more efficient way to power their furnaces, with electricity instead of coal. The practice of heating homes with coal dried up too, as people switched to natural gas. The decline of coal mining in Southern Colorado began in the nineteen sixties and by the end of seventies, nearly all the mines had closed. People began to leave the area in search of work elsewhere. The New Elk mine changed hands several times, finally shuttering in the 1980s. But more recently, a last hope for coal led to an overhaul of the mine. It reopened in 2010, but went bankrupt soon thereafter when the bottom fell out of the global coal market. Today, New Elk Mine employs just a few workers, enough to keep the buildings from falling into disrepair, if the market were ever to open up again.
