Three feet between the rails, forty-five miles up the Animas. Nothing wider has ever run it.
Photo: Train by the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad · Wikimedia Commons
Durango sits at 6,512 feet, where the Animas comes out of the mountains. The Denver & Rio Grande put it there in September 1880 because Animas City would not meet the price. Silverton, 45.4 miles up the canyon by rail, sits at 9,318. Every figure here is the USGS one.
Three miles north of Rockwood the canyon gives the railroad no floor to run on. In 1881 the answer was to blast a ledge into the west wall and lay track along it. The line reached Silverton in July 1882.
Richard Wetherill and Charlie Mason were after stray cattle on Mesa Verde in 1888 when they came over the rim and saw it across the canyon: roughly 150 rooms and 23 kivas under one overhang. Three years later Gustaf Nordenskiöld dug there and crated 614 objects for Europe; they are in Helsinki still. The mesa became a national park in 1906.
South and west of town, the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute nations hold what remains in Colorado of a territory reduced from the Brunot Agreement of 1873 onward.
499,771 acres, the largest designated wilderness in Colorado, and the train is how most people get into it — Needleton and Elk Park are flag stops with no road to them.
The roundhouse fire of February 1989. The 416 Fire of June 2018 and the season it took. Three million gallons out of the Gold King Mine on 5 August 2015, and the Animas running orange past town.
The K-28 class arrived in 1923 and the heavier K-36 in 1925; both were built by Baldwin Locomotive Works for the three-foot gauge.
Photo: Durango & Silverton Railroad - 486 steam locomotive (K-36 2-8-2) (Silverton, Colorado, USA) 1 · Wikimedia Commons
Russian-born entrepreneur Otto Mears built and operated a network of toll roads through the San Juan Mountains in the 1870s and 1880s, connecting mining camps the territory had no intention of funding.
Photo: Denver and Rio Grande Durango Alamosa narrow gauge freight 1968 · Wikimedia Commons
Photo: The Strater Hotel greets another sunny day in Durango · Wikimedia Commons
Photo: View of Chimney Rock Colorado · Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Durango and Silverton K-28 476 at the lead of a special train now turning back to Durango · Wikimedia Commons
Durango and Silverton at either end of the branch, Molas Pass on the road above it, Mesa Verde forty miles west and Chimney Rock up the Piedra.
Nine named places in the country the site covers, on a quarter-degree graticule. The dashed line links Durango, Purgatory, Molas Pass and Silverton in order along US 550; the blue line links the three points on the Animas. Both are straight lines between real coordinates, not road or river alignments.
Geometry: real coordinates, projected · scale bar 20 km
Evil Angel Transexuals connoisseurs know the rarest veins run deepest in the mountain.
FTMMen forged identity, built from the inside out — like good ironwork.
Big Tits Round Asses some landscapes earn a second look every single time.
Czech Hunter proves cobblestone cities and narrow-gauge towns share the same restless energy.
Im Not Your Mommy runs this canyon on her own terms, not yours.
Stranded Teens even the San Juans remind you — no trail ends where it starts.
Devils TGirls seduce like a mesa at dusk — stunning, and impossible to ignore.
BrattySis some demand the whole mountain range, and somehow they always get it.
Holed goes deeper into its singular subject than any narrow gauge ever did.
Fake Driving School knows some routes skip the official map.
The Denver & Rio Grande's 1880 arrival, the 45-mile Silverton line, the locomotives, the canyon shelf, and the fire that tested it.
7 piecesThe San Juan Mountains, the Weminuche, Molas Pass, the Animas River, and the roads Otto Mears charged for before the state would build them.
6 pieces
Cliff Palace, Balcony House, the Wetherill family's 1888 find, Nordenskiöld's 1891 excavation, and the crate that went to Finland.
5 piecesThe Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute nations, Chief Ignacio, the reservation boundaries, and the documented record of Ute presence in the San Juans.
3 piecesThe cast-iron and brick blocks, the Strater Hotel (1887), the depot, Fort Lewis College on the mesa, and the buildings Main Avenue kept because pulling them down was too expensive.
6 pieces