It feels as though I’ve mostly been doing day trips from
Denver for quite a while . That’s made me feel a little stir crazy, and what’s
keeping me cooped-up in town anyway? After all, I returned to Colorado to get
out into the wilderness and lead an active life in the mountains. What I’m in
the mood for is to climb a mountain in a different part of the state than I’ve
hiked in before, and after all the years I lived in Colorado there are still
many such places. After consulting maps and hiking trail guidebooks as well as
online sites, I decided on a road trip of three to four days in southern
Colorado built around hiking/climbing West Spanish Peak during what looks like
a good weather window of opportunity with low thunderstorm risk.

Southern Colorado is a place I usually only travel through
quickly on I-25 on the way to New Mexico. Read a bit about Colorado history,
though, and you’ll find that there are several notable towns in the area where
some significant historical events took place. My first brief stop was in
Walsenburg, the seat of Huerfano County and a town with a few architecturally
notable buildings like the Huerfano County Courthouse. From there south I took
backroads that paralleled the Interstate rather than the highway itself – why take
the same road twice if you can possibly avoid doing so?

Las Animas County is one of the largest physically in
Colorado but also one of the least populated. That wasn’t always the case. If
you look at historical population figures from the Census Bureau, around the
turn of the twentieth century Las Animas was Colorado’s fourth most populous
county after Denver, Pueblo, and Weld with about four times as many people as
it currently contains . Why such a large population and then massive decline?
Well, around a century ago the region around Trinidad was a major coal mining
center. Once the coal was gone or became uneconomical to extract there was
little work and mostly European immigrant population left the area for places
where there were jobs.

It was around coal mining that the region’s best known
historical event took place, the so-called Ludlow Massacre, the April 20, 1914
attack on a tent camp of 1,200 striking coal miners by the National Guard which
left approximately two dozen dead. The event was the bloodiest in a year-long
strike by the United Mine Workers against mines in southern Colorado that
resulted in almost 200 deaths overall. While back then Ludlow was a town of 900
residents, nowadays all there is at Ludlow is a monument commemorating the massacre
and memorializing those who died in the violence.

Nowadays the town of Trinidad, the last one along the
interstate in Colorado on the way to New Mexico, has around 9,000 residents,
but it seems like a much bigger and grander place than most towns of that size .
That’s, or course, because it once had about twice as many people and was the
center of a more populous mining region. There aren’t too many towns of its
current size which have some many attractive old historic buildings in their
downtowns or such a selection of historic homes from the Victorian era which
can be toured. I spent most of the afternoon wandering around Trinidad and
touring several of them, including the Baca House which contains the Trinidad
History Museum and the Bloom House, one of the town’s most opulent Victorian
structures.