Tom Schweich  

Cross Grizzly Creek

Just downstream is the junction of Grizzly Creek and Little Grizzly Creek, which point is considered to be the headwaters of the North Platte River.

Cross Peterson Ridge

Junction: County Route 24, west in the direction of Buffalo Pass.

Walden

Hustead(?) Ranch

Gould

State Forest State Park

Ranger Lakes

Jackson County above …

Interpretive panel at Cameron Pass.	Interpretive panel for Forest Conservation.	Informational sign for Cache la Poudre - North Park Scenic and Historic Byway.	View a little east of south to Lulu Mountain on the right and Thunder Mountain on the left.	Michigan Ditch approaches Colorado Highway 14.
The water from Michigan Ditch exits through a gaging station.	Cameron Pass, Larimer and Jackson Counties, Elevation 10, 276 feet.

Auto Tourism

Highway 14

The first Highway over Cameron Pass, completed in 1882 but the Cache la Poudre and North Park Toll Road Company, ran more than one hundred miles from Fort Collins to the silver camp of Teller. Travelers paid three dollars per wagon, with additional fees for herd and pack animals, for the privilege of laboring up a demanding, boulder-strewn route. Some stretches were so hard to navigate (especially steep Pingree Hill) they left teamsters cursing in frustration. Opened to free public travel in 1902, the road received much-needed improvements in the 1910s, with a smoother surface and an easier grade carved out by convict laborers. When the road reopened in 1915, two hundred automobiles drive to a celebratory picnic at milepost 109 (about forty miles east of here), motoring with ease over the once formidable route — and heralding a new generation of auto tourism.

The Autobungaloofer, seen here in 1921, epitomized America's craze for auto tourism. Serene mountain towns cleared trees and shrubs to make room for homes on wheels. For those who didn't think to bring the house with them, motels were built, while Mom and Pop made room for convenience stores, gift shops, and bait shops.

As early as 1896 John C. Zimmerman, with help from his wife and four children, built their second hotel, the Keystone. Most of the construction on the three-story, forty-room building, including brickmaking, was done by hand.

Convicts from the state penitentiary in Cañon City completed much of the work in the Cache la Poudre and North Park Toll Road. In 1917 the Rocky Mountain News credited convicts working in the Poudre Canyon with having completed the most difficult work out of some 145 miles constructed within the state of Colorado.

By the 1870s, boom towns Lulu and Teller City, just west of bustling Fort Collins, were established and silver excitement was in the air. The Cache la Poudre and North Park Toll Road was built to provide smooth passage for trade.

Auto Tourism

By 1927 automobiles could drive the Cameron Pass roas all the way from Fort Collins to Walden — about a hundred miles. Toursim soon became a major industry in the Cache la Poudre corridor, with campgrounds and motor courts lining the valley. Ironically, this influx of people compromised the very attractions — solitude and beauty — that drew visitors in the first place. The paradox climaxed in the early 1970s, when developers proposed a ski area atop Cameron Pass to lure the Winter Olympics to Colorado. Local residents joined environmentalists from across the state to defeat the idea, but one element of the plan survived — an asphalt surface for unpaved Highway 14. That brought still more traffic, helping the economy but applying more pressure on the wilderness. The same trade-off confronts communities throughout Colorado, representing one of the biggest challenges of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Forest Conservation

Pingree Park During the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s, the timber fell almost continuously in Pingree Park. Named for the legendary tie-hack George Pingree (who supposedly could cut a hundred ties a day), the tree-covered valley about seventeen miles east of here supplied the Union Pacific with much of its building material. Overcutting decimated the forests, and the site lay abandoned from the 1870s until 1912, when the Agricultural College of Colorado (later Colorado State University) acquired the land. The college, ironically, transformed this overused resource into a model of wise environmental management. Pingree Park became an outdoor classroom, anchoring one of the nation's leading natural resource programs. Colorado State produced so many U.S. Forest Service and National Park employees that it was named “the Ranger Factory” — a training ground for latter-day George Pingrees who build forests up rather than chopping them down.

The legendary George Pingree in 1859 — two years before enlisting in the U. S. Army at Central City. After the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, Pingree served a ten-day sentence at Fort Lyon for scalping thirteen Indians. He resented his sentence and never regretted his part in the massacre.

In October 1986, Congress passed the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to protect the few unpolluted, undeveloped rivers in the United States. Since then, over 10,000 river miles have been protected, including seventy-five miles of the Cache la Poudre — the only Colorado river pristine enough to allow designation.

Right: Grand Ditch construction camp, Hitchen's Gulch, 1942. Begun in the early 1900s, the Grand Ditch was among the first transmountain diversion structures built in the state. There are eight such structures carrying water from other river basins to the Poudre River to supplement it during warm summer months.

Tie-hacks were paid to cents per tie, and could usually cut thirty to forty a day. Legend has it that George Pingree, standing over six feet tall and weighing 225 pounds, could cut one hundred a day.

Irrigation

Farmers have been tapping the Cache la Poudre for irrigation since the early 1870s — and Colorado's government has been regulating the river almost as long. Because water is so scarce in Colorado, state legislators created a network of water districts in 1876 to ensure fair distribution among the various claimants. Since then, the system — based on the doctrine of prior appropriation, which gives top priority to the oldest claims — has governed water use throughout Colorado. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the nature of water regulation changed, with irrigation needs balanced against environmental, aesthetic, and recreational concerns. In October 1986, the federal government set aside seventy-five miles of the Cache la Poudre as a Wild and Scenic River, the only Colorado river so designated.

Joe Wright Reservoir

Spencer Heights

Kinikinik

Rustic

Eggers Fishing Access Site

Stove Prairie Landing

Poudre Park

Teds Place

Fort Collins

Raymer