My favorite dog-walking trail near town has just undergone another transformation from the federal Bureau of Land Management. A new sign sprouted on a post at its start a few days ago: ROUTE CLOSED. And then, a few days later, the post and sign were gone.
Before March of this year, it was just a bone-jarring mud-holed rock-ridden chunk of dead-end road that twisted for less than a mile between the railroad tracks and the Arkansas River about two miles downstream from Salida. Then the BLM planted a post in it, announcing it was closed to motorized vehicles.
That post was knocked down, and there were complaints about diminished access.
The BLM put up a new post, but a few days ago, the agency changed the sign from “No motorized vehicles allowed” to ROUTE CLOSED.
What happened?
The BLM does not want to encourage people to trespass on railroad property, and this route did wander across some railroad land at various points. Thus the new sign.
Some history is in order. The line was built by the Denver & Rio Grande in 1880. The D&RG was not a “land grant railroad” like the Union Pacific or Northern Pacific, wherein the federal government subsidized construction by issuing vast tracts (generally alternate sections for ten miles out from both sides of the tracks) that the railroad could then sell.
But where the D&RG crossed public lands, all the federal government gave it was a right-of-way that extended 100 feet on both sides of the center line of the track. It shows up on old maps as a “railroad reservation” because the land was “reserved” from other uses, like mining claims or homesteads, along the same lines as Indian reservations or military reservations.
As the BLM implemented its travel management plan for this area earlier this year, determining which routes would be open to motorized vehicles, the agency recently discovered that this trail, as it wound along the river, also wound across railroad land.
Apparently no one had really noticed before because there’s a barbed-wire fence (not in good repair) between the tracks and the road. But the fence, as it turns out, was just to keep cattle off the tracks; it didn’t indicate the property boundary.
As for the property owner, the original D&RG became the Denver & Rio Grande Western, which became part of the Southern Pacific in 1988. In 1996, the Southern Pacific was merged into the Union Pacific, and the UP decided to close the “Tennessee Pass Line” through here. The last train over these tracks ran in early 1999 to haul the last load of lead and zinc concentrates from the Black Cloud Mine near Leadville as it shut down.
In railroad parlance, the line is not abandoned; instead it is “out of service.” The rails remain in place, but they are covered with rust and sit atop rotting cross-ties on a weedy roadbed dotted with sporadic small rockslides.
If the UP actually used the land it owns for its intended purpose of providing transportation, that would be one thing. But as it is, I plan to keep walking my dog there. I’ll take my chances on getting arrested for trespassing by the railroad cops.
As for the post and sign that vanished a couple of days ago, I called the BLM, figuring there had been yet another development and perhaps the BLM was washing its hands of this troublesome portion of the travel-management plan. But no, the post and ROUTE CLOSED should have been there. Some vandal had pulled out the post, and the BLM plans to replace it.
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