The Wild Southwest

Jen Zeuner chases Sarah Sturm as the last evening light fades on the Colorado Trail at Molas Pass north of Durango. SONY, 1/320 sec, f/11, ISO 3200

The Wild Southwest Passionate Trail Communities Sprout Near Durango

Cowboys often roam the streets of Durango, Colorado. Men with big mustaches and women in snug corset dresses wander the town’s sidewalks among the locals and tourists. They’ll offer a tip of the hat and a “howdy” to passersby, hinting that wherever they came from was wild and lawless, and that they’d love for you, too, to step back from the modern world and into one in which simple pleasantries and quaint acknowledgments were still the norm.

These cowboys and cowgirls are mostly actors playing parts related to Durango’s Wild West history for the amusement of visitors but, for locals, they give a nod to the settlement’s rough and dusty roots. A town born from grit. A town born in the high country of southwestern Colorado.

Durango’s trails reflect the region’s rugged qualities. Most were built in vast open spaces with little oversight and reckless abandon—rowdy kids beating in paths or herds of horses wandering through sagebrush fields.

One of town’s most popular trail systems, Horse Gulch, was once a free-for-all on county land. Longtime locals recall how the open space acted as an unofficial dump for discarded tires, washing machines, and refrigerators. The debris littered the road and gullies. Rabble-rousers drove their trucks or dirt bikes up the mile-and-a-half-long doubletrack to party on weekends. Back then there were no official trails, more bonfires than bicycles, more single-use plastic than singletrack, and more gun-shootin’ kids wreaking havoc than crushing berms.

Horse Gulch is now a mountain bike playground filled with meticulously cared-for trails. Just a mile from the heart of downtown, it’s quick and easy to get to—an outdoor church of sorts for those seeking an accessible and quiet natural reprieve. The land was purchased and conserved in the early ‘90s and cleaned up by Durango’s trail advocacy group, Trails 2000 (now Durango Trails), before being released back to the community for more nonmotorized recreation.

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