The South Park Valley has fascinated me long before it
became famous in a cartoon . I first passed through it just before Thanksgiving
in 1991 on my way to Santa Fe to meet a friend. It had been an unusually cold
start to winter and South Park seemed like a barren frigid wasteland of deep
and blowing snow. South Park is one of three so-called “parks” in Colorado, the
others being called Middle Park and North Park, large relatively flat valleys
between mountain ranges that are high, dry, and frigid. They’re all sparsely
populated and given over mostly to ranching.

I decided to take a drive through the western part of the valley
including the valley’s main town, Fairplay, and then to Weston Pass, a pass
over the range between the South Park and Arkansas Valleys which I also have not
crossed. The scenery on the west side of South Park was beautiful in the bright
sunshine, one of those autumn Colorado days when all the colors seem especially
vivid, the blue of high altitude sky, the gold of the aspens, the deep green of
the pines, and browns and beiges of the dry grass .

The road to Weston Pass on the South Pass side is unpaved
but good and graded and not especially steep. The road on the other side of the
pass is another story, though. It’s very rocky and rugged and considered one of
the most punishing pass drives in Colorado. I chickened out a short distance
from the pass and backtracked to U.S. 285, the much longer route to Leadville
via Buena Vista. I have a pretty good record of chickening out on some of these
rough passes I’ve considered crossing in recent years. Altogether, though, it
was a good trip and a beautiful day in a spot in Colorado that was new for me.