At the time, Lost Canyon was sort of familiar

 “Sometimes being lost is the best way to find yourself.” 

 ― LJ Vanier, Ether: Into the Nemesis 

 “Not all those who wander are lost.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien. 

 Finding what is Lost in the canyon

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Familiar, or Lost, on the edge of Dolores. Some of that was difficult language to resolve for a young buck, like me. How can it be lost, when it is so familiar? Like a trip to the Dump, or on past one of the cemeteries.

Chunks of emptiness carry names like Cajon Canyon, McElmo, Hovenweep, the lower Dolores watershed, the Paradox Valley, Outlaw Trail, and (appropriately enough) Disappointment. The vast stretches of canyons and mesas run up the edges of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizonia  and Utah. It is remote, water-challenged, and easy to get lost and stay lost there. Even the rivers sometimes run the wrong way.  

But over Fourth Street Bridge. And down the canyon near the creek and/or canal down passed the Lobato's place, and the Pole Yard and into the Canyon on the old rail grade as it narrowed?

If you were coming from Durango on the old Mancos cutoff on the Ridge, you would drop down into town near the Cemetery and Cline's place, anyway.

Old Beagle Suzie got lost in the Gamble Oak brush near the Dump turnoff one day, but for the most part it was hard to become lost in Lost Canyon near Dolores. She often had to be carried out of Oak brambles when she went on scent. But, just follow the rail bed (either way for three or four miles and you would likely run into a decent gravel or paved road out of there. Maybe by the sawmill and out on to small farm country on The Ridge, or back to the main branch of  the Dolores River, and then across the old steel bridge on into town.

The

Rio Grande Southern (RGS) Railroad (1889–1951) was a  162-mile narrow-guage line that ran from Durango to Ridgway traveling in the rugged San Juan Mountains. A key, scenic segment of the route followed Lost Creek through Lost Canyon before descending into the town of Mancos on one end, and into the Dolores River, at Dolores, Colorado, on the other end.

For the first few years of its life, the RGS would have fallen under the definition of a "Bonanza Railroad" which meant it was an instant success, quickly generating more than enough money for the investors and covering costs spent to build the railroad, but their wealth would not last long due to the Silver Panic of 1893, which would permanently cripple the railroad's finances. 

The town had marks of the railroad all over it, when I was a kid. But Dolores in the 1970s had been separated from the rails just long enough to have an identity crisis, but not long enough to forget where it came from.

 

It was as Mark Twain said. “A railroad is like a lie, you have to keep building it to make it stand.”

 

 

Rio Grande Southern narrow gauge locomotive, engine number 20, in Dolores. 

 

Galloping Goose #5 was out in the town park over by the marshal’s office on the jail side of the town hall. If you were a skinny runt, you could squeeze into the cab through the loosely chained bus-like doors and pretend.

“Driving that train… Casey Jones you better watch your speed.”

 

The main highway in and out was called “Railroad Avenue.” Various buildings around town were labeled with left-over monikers such as the ‘track warehouse’ or the Rio Grande Southern Hotel. 

 

Corrugated tin, painted Rio Grande yellow, covered the outside of dozens of other buildings, and platforms, built to service freight from boxcars, still appeared in front of about a third of the businesses in town.

The boarded-up section house still stood between the Sixth and Seventh Street out on the highway.

 

Legions of cub scouts were still able to gather rail spikes, track hardware and telegraph insulators from the rotting ties and weathered poles in Lost Canyon and pack them over across the rusting Fourth Street Bridge back into Dolores. They would end up in a coffee can in someone’s garage or as tent stakes, or sold for scrap at Curt’s Trading Post.

 

I remember one cub scout trip where a Little League baseball team, the "Orioles" dominated the troop, and me, being in the minority, as a Yankee, had to eat my sack lunch with other members of minority in troop, Twins and Tigers.

 

The town of Dolores was born with the railroad in mind.

“In 1889 plans were made by Otto Mears for a railroad running through and around the western flanks of the San Juan Mountains from Ridgway in the north to Durango in the south,” according to the Mountain Studies Institute. “The railroad would tap the riches accumulating in the booming mountain mining towns of Telluride and Rico and the smaller mining camps between the two towns. The 162-mile railroad would, as well, link two segments of the Denver Rio Grande Railroad coming into Durango from the east and into Ouray from the north. The new railroad would be known as the Rio Grande Southern.”

 

But as we all know, it is important to be near where the action is.

The fledgling settlement of Big Bend, which had been located nearly two miles downriver from present-day Dolores since 1878, basically pulled up stakes and moved to where the rails from Durango entered the Dolores River Valley.

 

“In 1890 two Big Bend businessmen laid out the town site of Dolores at the mouth of Lost Canyon. The rest of the citizen’s of Big Bend soon followed. By the time the tracks reached Dolores on Thanksgiving Day, 1891, the community of Big Bend was no more,” according to Mountain Studies Institute. 

 

Born as a product of the rails, for 60 years Dolores lived in the shadow of the line, finally waving goodbye from the platform in 1951 when Rio Grande Southern closed and most of the track was pulled up and sold for scrap.

The RGS closed down and was dismantled in 1952–1953, but it is well known as one of the most rugged and iconic narrow-gauge mountain railroads in the history of Colorado. 

Out on the Ridge, when I was in high school, you were able to come up the connector to Haycamp Mesa Road in the bottom of the canyon and come up to a switch back around an old sawmill that we used to ride intertubes down in the winter in the snow, right near what then Walker's Sawmill. 

Tom Casper writes "When you mention Lost Canyon I hope you are referring to the part just east of Dolores; I drove to the 2nd Smalley (lumber mill site) twice and hiked to 1st Smalley once in the 80's. The other end of the canyon past Glencoe is a road open for car travel from Millwood. Part of it is on Indian land so is not always open to drive. [the spur is named for R.O. Smalley, who operated a sawmill south of Lost Canyon with a 1-car spur (called Smalley) at MP 109.0 in 1917. As was often the case with these small mills, it was moved north to MP 108.5 (near Lost Canyon), existing there from 1917 to (approx) 1920 with a 6-car spur.] 

Tom also refers to Road S, which turns into Forest Service Rd. 556 (and eventually becomes Haycamp Mesa Rd) When you turn on this road, it drops down grade to the bottom of the canyon and cuts the old roadbed. "Just past the grade and as the road starts back up the hill, there was a field road that could be driven with a high clearance vehicle that goes to the creek and would get you on the grade. I haven't been back there since the late 80's so don't know if it is fenced now or not. The trail to the grade was getting thin in a few spots from creek erosion so maybe by now all you can do is walk."

"Past Smalley, the grade crossed the creek and that is as far as one could drive. There are trestle bents and a few stringers left in the canyon when I hiked it plus lots of ties. In a couple of spots, there was stacked stone retaining walls to keep the grade from washing out."