Joyful Journey: The Rift Valley, the Sand Dunes, and the Cranes of Monte Vista

The ground beneath your feet is moving away from the ground on the far side of it. Slowly, a few millimeters per year, but persistently, the Rocky Mountains are spreading apart along a line running from central Colorado down through New Mexico into west Texas and northern Mexico. Geologists call this the Rio Grande Rift. The San Luis Valley is a graben: the dropped center section of crust pulling apart, one of the largest and most active in North America.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the eastern edge are a fault block, a mass of rock left standing while the valley floor sank beside them. Look east from anywhere in the valley and you can trace the fault line: the hard edge between flat and vertical with almost no foothills in between. The fault zones are also the plumbing for every hot spring in the valley, including the one you are heading toward today.

The Sangre de Cristo fault system is still active. Surveys of deposits along the fault show displacement from earthquakes within the last ten thousand years. The mountains are still rising, the valley floor still sinking. This is your landscape for today: the floor of a geologically active rift basin that has been developing for 35 million years, still heating the water that will be waiting for you at Joyful Journey.

If you had to design the worst possible place in Colorado to grow sand dunes, you would pick the foot of a 14,000-foot mountain range, in an alpine valley at 7,600 feet elevation, in the middle of a rift basin that receives less than eight inches of rain a year. The dunes do not make intuitive sense. They are too big for where they are, too desert-feeling for a landscape surrounded by snow-covered peaks. And yet: 30 square miles of sand piled 750 feet high, the tallest dunes on the continent.

About 440,000 years ago, a large lake called Lake Alamosa covered much of the southern San Luis Valley. It persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, accumulating thick layers of fine-grained sediment. Then it broke through its southern rim and drained. Where a deep lake had been, there was now a vast flat plain of dry lake-bottom sediment exposed to the open sky and the relentless valley winds. The sand on that lake floor came eroded from both the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo ranges over millions of years.

Sand goes up into the dunes from the valley, pushed by southwest winds. Sand is pushed toward the mountain passes by storm winds. Medano Creek and Sand Creek carry it back down to the valley floor. The next southwest wind pushes it back up again. The dunefield is in dynamic equilibrium, recycling the same material over and over. Star Dune, the tallest, rises 750 feet. High Dune, closest to the parking area, stands 699 feet. For scale: that is roughly half the height of the Empire State Building, made entirely of eroded mountain rock and dried lake sediment, moved grain by grain on the wind.

Walk to the creek edge on the right day in spring or early summer and you will see a phenomenon called surge flow: pulses of water moving in waves, the result of sand dams forming and releasing upstream. The water rises to ankle depth, then falls, then rises again, in rhythmic pulses that look like something programmed and are actually the natural hydraulics of a creek heavily loaded with sand. Children play in it. No tides, no pumps. Just sand and water working out their physics.

The people who established San Luis were not Americans. They were Hispano settlers from Taos, New Mexico, moving north on the authority of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, granted by the Mexican government in 1843. They built on Culebra Creek in the pattern of Spanish colonial settlement: homes around a central plaza, fields in long narrow strips running perpendicular to the creek, each strip giving a family access to both water and road. A social geometry as much as an agricultural one.

Within a year of founding, settlers dug the San Luis People's Ditch. The first recorded water right in the state of Colorado, predating statehood by nearly 25 years, hand-dug using wooden shovels and leather buckets. It diverts water from Culebra Creek into the network of channels that irrigate the farm strips on both sides of the creek. The San Luis People's Ditch is 170-plus years old and still irrigates the same fields it was built for.

In 2002, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in favor of the original Hispano settlers' heirs on the question of traditional grazing rights on the mountain commons above their deeded land, a decision acknowledging a 150-year community relationship with the land that Anglo property law had tried to extinguish. San Luis today has about 600 people, most descended from the original settlers, in a village that looks recognizably like the plaza town established in 1851. The church in the central plaza has been in continuous operation since 1862.

Fort Garland was established in 1858 at the foot of La Veta Pass, built of adobe in the Southwestern style. Its mission was characteristic of the era: protect Hispano settlers from Ute raiding parties, protect Ute bands from settler encroachment, and enforce treaty arrangements that kept changing as the United States decided it wanted more of the valley and then more of the mountains. The soldiers were simultaneously peacekeepers, enforcers, and scouts in a territory where the legal ground shifted under everyone's feet every few years.

The Mouache and Capote Ute were the bands whose territory included the San Luis Valley and the eastern Sangre de Cristo slope. Their seasonal movements through the valley had been part of the landscape for generations before the Hispano settlers arrived in 1851. The early decades of settlement were not a simple story of conflict: there were periods of trading, economic interdependence, and local cooperation alongside the raids and diplomatic crises that dominate the written record.

Kit Carson arrived at Fort Garland in May 1866, 56 years old and already ill with what would prove to be a terminal aortic aneurysm. By 1866 he had been a trapper, a scout for Fremont, a rancher, an Indian agent, a Civil War officer, and, most controversially, the man who commanded the forced removal of the Navajo people in 1863 and 1864. The Long Walk removed between 8,000 and 10,000 Navajo people, who were marched hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico and held in terrible conditions for four years. Roughly 2,000 died.

In September 1866, Carson persuaded Chief Ouray to bring his band to Fort Garland to negotiate. The negotiations that followed were the foundation for the 1868 Ute Treaty, which established a formal reservation covering roughly the western third of what would become Colorado. Carson died in May 1868, less than a year after leaving Fort Garland. He never saw the treaty finalized, nor saw how quickly it unraveled when silver and gold discoveries in the San Juans made the United States decide the Ute's guaranteed territory was inconveniently located over valuable ore deposits.

The Gruidae, the crane family, are recognizable in fossil beds dating back 47 to 54 million years. The sandhill crane staging at Monte Vista is, in a meaningful biological sense, one of the oldest continuous success stories in vertebrate evolution. While most of what was alive in the Eocene is unrecognizable to us now, the crane has been doing exactly this, more or less, for longer than the Rocky Mountains have existed in their current form.

The refuge floods wetland cells and managers mow grain fields to expose leftover harvest grain, creating food where little natural crane food exists in late winter. Without this management, the staging area would support a fraction of the birds. A crane arriving at Monte Vista after the New Mexico winter may be carrying minimal fat reserves. It needs weeks of intensive feeding on grain, insects, and invertebrates before it has the energy to continue north to breed.

Thousands of cranes roosting in standing water overnight, their calls producing a sound described, not inaccurately, as something between a French horn and a dinosaur. The unison call, a coordinated duet that bonded pairs perform, involves the male giving two calls for every one the female gives, the timing so precise and practiced that paired birds can hold it together even in the chaos of a flock of thousands.

The peak staging is long past when you drive through in late May. Most of the Rocky Mountain cranes are already on northern breeding grounds. But a smaller resident population nests in the valley itself. If the season is right, you may see small family groups or individual birds in the fields along CO-17. A crane standing alone in a potato field at 7,600 feet, 150 miles from the nearest ocean, visible against the Sangre de Cristo backdrop. Watch for them.

The San Luis Valley floor receives only six to eight inches of rain per year and sustains a plant community that would not look out of place in the Great Basin of Nevada. It is more precisely a high-altitude semi-arid grassland with severe constraints: alkaline and sometimes saline soils, low precipitation, intense UV radiation at 7,600 feet, frost possible in any month of the year, and groundwater chemistry that most plants cannot tolerate. The plants that live here are not survivors of a landscape that wants them gone. They are the right plants for this place.

The dominant shrub across the alkali flats. Its leaves push excess sodium out through the leaf tissue, allowing the plant to grow in soils that would kill most vegetation by osmotic stress. The four-wing designation comes from the winged seed capsules. You will see it along CO-17 and on the edges of the access road to Joyful Journey: low, mounding, salt-gray, with those papery seeds visible in season.

Grows in the wettest, saltiest depressions where the shallow water table comes close to the surface. Darker green than saltbush, with small succulent-looking leaves. Where you see greasewood, the water table is relatively close and the soil is very salty. It is a botanical indicator for the wettest, most mineralized parts of the valley floor.

The late-season bloomer. Lights up the valley floor in gold in late August and September when almost everything else has gone to seed. In late summer, its small yellow composite flowers are one of the primary late-season nectar sources for native bees, monarch butterflies on fall migration, and a range of other pollinators that have few other options after midsummer heat has dried most wildflowers.

The grass that grows in the wettest, saltiest drainages. A coarse, tussock-forming native grass that tolerates seasonal flooding with salt-laden water. Its seed heads form graceful plumes that blow in the valley wind. The dense communities of alkali sacaton in the valley's wet meadows provide cover and nesting habitat for ground-nesting birds and the invertebrates that form the base of the crane food chain.

The geothermal discharge keeps the immediate spring area slightly warmer than the surrounding valley floor in winter. The mineral-rich artesian overflow creates a wetland margin supporting cattails, rushes, and water-tolerant sedges in the seep areas. Hot spring margins are microenvironments, small islands of different conditions in a landscape otherwise defined by cold and dry, harboring plants and insects you would not find 200 yards away on the open flat.

The rock of Blanca Peak is nearly 1.7 billion years old, the ancient Precambrian basement that the sedimentary layers sat on top of before the mountains existed. The Rio Grande Rift fault system has lifted the entire Sangre de Cristo block while the valley beside it dropped, exposing these ancient rocks at elevations where most of North America's basement is buried miles below the surface. The fault has displaced the same Precambrian rock by more than 20,000 feet vertically.

The Navajo people, Diné, organize their world geographically around four sacred mountains, one at each cardinal direction, that define the boundaries of Dinétah, the traditional homeland. These mountains are not metaphors. They are specific physical places, identified by name and story, that establish where the Navajo world begins and ends and what it means to be within it. The eastern boundary mountain is Tsisnaasjini', which translates approximately as Dawn or White Shell Mountain. It is Blanca Peak.

Blanca Peak has never been within the political boundaries of any Navajo reservation. The original reservation established in 1868, in the treaty that ended the Long Walk imprisonment covered in the Fort Garland chapter, was drawn well south and west of Blanca's position. The Navajo Nation has maintained a formal interest in ceremonial access, and the relationship has continued through federal land ownership changes and cross-state jurisdiction, because a sacred mountain does not become less sacred when a political boundary is drawn past it.

The Sangre de Cristo fault continues to move. Paleoseismic work on fault trench excavations shows surface-rupturing earthquakes in the last 10,000 years. The mountains are still rising, driven by the same extension that opened the valley. The geology and the sacred significance are, in a sense, the same observation made in different languages: this is a place where the forces that shaped the world are still working, still visible, still present.

Taylor Sheridan's 1923 is set in Montana's Paradise Valley, where the Dutton family is fighting to hold a cattle ranch through drought, disease, and the encroachments of a changing West. In 1923, the world that family represents, the world of the open range and the horse-powered ranch, is already ending. The San Luis Valley in 1923 was that same transition, more compressed and more complicated, because the people who lived here had already been through several rounds of dispossession and adaptation before the early automobile age arrived again.

In the same decade that homesteaders were abandoning their claims, Japanese-American families from California and Colorado's Front Range established themselves in the valley introducing intensive truck farming: vegetables grown for sale in town markets and railroad-car shipment, requiring the kind of daily labor and technical skill the short growing season demanded. This community would later be forced into internment camps during World War II, a loss to the valley's agricultural knowledge that was not fully recovered.

In 1923, the horse was still the engine of valley farming. A team of Percherons pulling a potato harvester down a San Luis Valley field in October 1923 would have been utterly familiar to Jacob Dutton. The water is still here. The acequia still flows. The Sangres are in exactly the same position they were in 1923. Some of the families are too.