I’ll be traveling to Yuma, Colorado September 10-12 to check out the M12 Experimental Site and participate in Old Threshers.
trains!
I’ve been pretty disappointed that remnants of railroads once traveling from Boulder deep into the mountains are gone for the most part without a trace (see Switzerland Trail post). So I was quite excited recently to find, via a bike ride filming adventure down Valmont, this lot belonging to the Boulder County Railway Historical Society, offering up a bit of a connection to long gone lines.
on the Switzerland Trail
This chimney is all that’s left of what used to be a train station on the Switzerland Trail, formerly a narrow gauge railroad that ran from Boulder to Ward, hauling mining spoils and tourists. Now the railroad grade has trails/ dirt roads, and the former station is a picnic ground.
I am still looking for more recognizable railroad relics in the neighborhood of the Switzerland Trail for the film I’m working on that was originally about Ward and is now more about a reversal of the process of “civilization,” expansion and settlement as dramatized in Western films.
Huerfano Valley
One of the projects I am currently working on examines the layers of history in the landscape of/ surrounding the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Southern Colorado. Over the years (decades/ centuries) the Sangres and environs have served as something of a magnet for Native Americans not particularly interested in playing nice with usurping European settlers, outlaws of various stripes, and in the 1960s and 70s, hippies and back-to-the-landers forging new ways of living.
In the course of my research, I found that some of the communes established in the area were still going strong. This past weekend, I paid a visit to Libre, a community of hand-built homes nestled in the Huerfano valley and still very much vibrant 40 years after its inception. Nic Seivert snapped a couple of digital pics of structures and landscape while I wielded the Bolex.
Marcy Saude 