Private property and nature

Note: This post was originally written in Summer 2006 for a previous version of www.viewfindermedia.com.

My Jeep is powering up a hill in the San Juan Mountains several miles outside of Telluride. The headlights cut through the darkness of the four-wheel drive road in front of me and I admire how this drive couldn’t be more of a contrast from my usual commute to Denver. This is exactly why I’m here for my summer vacation.

I maneuver through a switchback where a truck squeezes alongside my Jeep. It’s strange, in the past I’ve never seen another soul driving up here before dawn. As the truck passes I see its bed is filled with tripods, orange vests and surveying lenses.

I summit the hill where I see the Alta ghost town, a group of splintery wooden buildings that surprisingly still stand after being built in such a harsh climate more than one hundred years ago. However, something else is different on this visit. There are now fences with “private property” signs circling the buildings, there are survey stakes delineating invisible boundaries along the road and some of the structures are strung with yellow “caution” tape. These aren’t the sort of things that evoke the feeling that you are trudging into the inaccessible remoteness of what was once a booming mining camp.

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I park the Jeep and set up my own tripod outside. I reach for my camera bag to pull out my Nikon and place it on the tripod. I choose a wide-angle lens and peer through the viewfinder to compose a shot of what was once a boarding house with X-shaped walls and a window that frames the distant Wilson Peak – a mountain with its own recent history of private property struggles according to friends who like to climb fourteeners and are miffed about having to pay access fees to climb there. The sun rises and illuminates the cracks in the building’s textured façade. The snowy slopes of Wilson Peak shine in a pink alpenglow. I click the shutter and preserve a record of my visit.

After I photograph Alta I continue driving toward Gold King Basin nearby. The basin doesn’t have the cascading waterfalls of other nature photography hot spots like Yankee Boy Basin near Ouray or the jagged peaks that surround the meadows of Crested Butte, but it doesn’t have the crowds of those places either. What the basin shares with the other more popular destinations is a spectrum of wildflowers from the scarlet reds of paintbrush to the yellows of arnica and the indigos of columbine. Maybe no other place in the state has such a concentration of color.

Gold King Basin

Like Alta, the basin isn’t exempt from signs of civilization. Years ago someone built a house along a lake at the basin’s base. I imagine that if the inhabitants want to stay there during the winter they’d be buried in snow for months but I can’t blame them for wanting to have such a spectacular backyard bouquet of flowers to themselves in the summer. Despite my sympathy for the homeowner I grow more aggravated that I’ll have to hide the house behind a boulder in my viewfinder or have to Photoshop it out of my photos when I get home.

I return to Telluride in the afternoon where I pick up a newspaper. On the front page there is a story detailing the Town of Mountain Village’s plans to possibly annex the Alta area and build more than seventy homes, fifty cabins and a lodge close to the ghost town. The story didn’t say what would become of Gold King Basin, but it doesn’t take much to surmise that development would eventually spread there too if the annexation is approved. No more wildflowers.

I have plans to visit Alta again this summer. I never know when it might be the last chance I have to see it before it is surrounded by modern cabins. I’m not the only one who likes to drive on four-wheel drive roads through ghost towns and flower-filled basins. Places like Alta and Gold King Basin don’t stay a secret for long.