With nice weather and no snows having closed any the roads
in the high country yet, I decided that rather than to take the long way from
Crested Butte to Buena Vista I’d take a short cut via Taylor Park and
Cottonwood Pass, a route I took once back in the early 1990s . There are still certain
“holes” in my mental map of Colorado, places that regardless of how much I’ve
traveled through the state over the years, there are significant areas that I
don’t know very well because I’ve had little reason to explore them in detail.
One of those is the Taylor Park area in eastern Gunnison County.

From Crested Butte you have to drive south a few miles
toward Gunnison before turning off onto the road through Taylor River Canyon to
Taylor Park and its large reservoir. In the Colorado high country the word “park”
means a large open high elevation basin between mountain ranges. The three main
ones, North, Middle, and South Parks are large mostly treeless areas between
8,000 and 10,000 feet in altitude given mostly over to ranching. Oh, and yes,
South Park is the setting for the famous cartoon and is a real place. Taylor
Park is a smaller such area on the west side of the Sawatch Range and the
Continental Divide that’s a particularly remote spot in Colorado . On the whole
I can’t say it’s one of the most scenic places in Colorado. Although surrounded
by mountains in the distance, they’re less dramatic from the basin than view
from many other directions.

From Taylor Park the unpaved but graded forest service road
snakes up gradually to Cottonwood Pass on the Continental Divide at 12,126 feet.
I had great weather and bright late afternoon sunshine for the spectacular
views in all directions from the pass. The nearly 4,000 foot descent to Buena
Vista to the Arkansas River Valley is now paved all the way from the pass, an
improvement from 1993 when much of the descent was still on a gravel road.

I spent the night at a campground in Buena Vista and had a
good smothered burrito for dinner at one of the casual roadside Southwestern/Mexican
joints in town. Nothing beats a cheesy, meaty southwestern style burrito
smothered in cheese and green chili sauce to make you feel satisfied as well as
fattened up!

In the morning I set out for Saint Elmo, one of Colorado’s
most significant ghost towns dating from the gold rush era of the late 1800s .
The village is up Chalk Creek from Buena Vista and situated in a deep canyon
below the Continental Divide and between fourteeners Mount Princeton and Mount
Antero. Saint Elmo doesn’t have much in the way of sights, though. It’s mostly
an atmospheric and photogenic little village of historic shacks in various
stages of preservation and disrepair. It’s hard to believe that at one brief
point in time the settlement had a population of over 1,000 people. There are
quite good historical markers explaining the historic significance of what you
are looking at, though.