Black Hawk Canyon Mine

We have really enjoyed riding the county roads around La Veta.  We have seen lots of wildlife, wild flowers and incredible mountain views.  We have also found lots of old abandoned coal mines.  This one was the Black Hawk Canyon mine.  I took a picture of the coal seam they were digging out in the top picture.  The place they did all the processing is in the second picture. 

We have enjoyed the deer that wonder through the campground eating the flowers and now they eat the crab appples.  There is also a bear hanging around town and he has come to visit the campground.   The ranch dogs across the river go crazy and have had him treed but he still comes back.  We have to be very careful with keeping the dumpster chained shut and warning the tenters to be prepared to go to the bathhouse or their car.

Overall we have had a nice time here in La Veta and the campground we've been in has been one of the nicer ones.  The owners were great to work for and we had great fellow workampers.  It will be sad to leave but on to new adventures.

Great Sand Dunes National Park

We took some friends to see the Great Sand Dunes.  The dunes are only about 60 miles from La Veta so a lot of people stay in our park and then make a day of visiting them.  There is an outfitter in La Veta that rents sand boards and sleds to use on the dunes.  They trudge up the dunes as far as they can -- its a hard walk because your feet sink in the sand- and then they ski or sled down.  The other popular activity is to enjoy the water that runs at the bottom of the dunes.  This late in summer it is only a trickle but earlier it was running well enough to raft.  As the water dries up people use it like a beach. 

The dunes are as much as 750 feet high which makes them the tallest in North America.  Mid-day in the summer the sand can reach 150 degrees.  This is high country with elevations from 8000 to 13000 feet.  High winds and lightening are real dangers here.  The winds tend to come from three or four directions which created and maintains the dunes.  We didn't think the dunes would be much to see since we have seen White Sands and the Imperial Sand dunes but these are much more impressive.

House on the Bridge

Our trip along the highway of legends (highway 12) going south out of La Veta took us past the gorgeous mountain lakes I pictured in the last post.  We followed it along all the way to milepost 42 to see the "House on the Bridge".  The house was built on top of the bridge that crosses this small creek.  There was too much brush in the way to get a good picture from the highway.  We went past it and then took a gravel road that took us alongside it.  It is falling down and in the top picture you can't really tell that it is sitting on top of a bridge.  We should have tried going farther up the gravel road to see if we would have gotten a better picture. Oh Well maybe next time. 

There is an app for travelers called travelers stories.  It's a free app and you can download the story of the highway of legends in Colorado.   As you travel the highway it then tells the story of each interesting thing along the way that you can still see or maybe gone but is still part of the history of the area.  The app works for other areas not just this one and if you download the story before you travel you don't have to worry about losing cell signal because it will still work. 

North Lake

We took a drive south of La Veta following the "Highway of Legends".  You drive up to the top of Cuchara Pass which has some s curves til you get to the top and then down a fairly steep grade.  The good thing is it is not a long steep drop but I still wouldn't want to do it with an RV.  It always amazes us that people will take this road with their RV.  The other astounding thing is this is one of the evacuation routes out of La Veta if it floods YIKES.

The first beautiful site after the pass is this lake.  It is a beautiful mountain lake.  There were people fishing mostly in small rubber rafts and very small boats.  These are all trout lakes and made from impounding the water runoff from the snow melt.   We find most lakes like this are stocked with fish because there  is little natural production.    I would fish this just to enjoy the scenery - outstanding!