Colorado’s wildest escape: the South San Juans

cumbres pass » Ah, the San Juans! America’s Alps, Colorado’s alpha mountain range. An ocean of peaks sprawling for 12,000 square miles across the state’s southwestern corner. With hundreds of peaks over 12,000 feet in elevation and eight more than 14,000 high, the San Juans contain some of the loneliest, loftiest stretches of Colorado’s Continental Divide.

The crown jewel of this spectacular landscape is the South San Juanwilderness, 249 square miles hard down against the Newmexico border. The only access to this wilderness is by foot or hoof, on trails that are long and steep and most often disintegrate into mere suggestions marked by occasional rock cairns. Here, broad, stormswept tundra mesas wash up against mountains in every direction. Massive snowfields linger long into summer, and water, fed by the melt, roars, gushes and sparkles everywhere. In the South San Juanwilderness, seeing another person is more startling than seeing an elk.

Colorado’s last grizzly bear was killed— accidentally, when the bear charged a surprised elk hunter and he defended himself — near the headwaters of the Navajo River in the South San Juanwilderness in 1979. Some say she wasn’t the last of her kind, that grizzlies still roam the South San Juan. If any great bears do exist in Colorado, the South San Juanwilderness is the place that is spacious and lost and wild enough to hide them.