Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine
There are many trails in the Upper Arkansas Valley, and they all tell us something about who passed over them, and how they lived. The oldest ones we know of were footpaths used by the Ute peoples for centuries before we Anglo-Saxons invaded them 150-200 years ago. We still refer to part of Chaffee County Road 175 as the Ute Trail. The most common trails are the ones many of us hike and bike on, and those are very new, built to accommodate the invention of the mountain bike some fifty years ago. Most of those trails were built in the last 5 to 10 years in response to the growing numbers of tourists seeking refuge from city life.
People started wandering into this area some ten thousand years ago, after a long journey by sea and land from Asia. Four hundred years ago, Spaniards ventured north along the Rio Grande Valley, bringing their herds of sheep and cattle into the San Luis and Arkansas Valleys, leaving a few still-visible cart tracks. Because they employed herdsmen to keep their herds bunched together and moving, they left few trails and did not damage the grasslands, so the Upper Arkansas Valley has little more than a few place names to record that time. Three hundred years later, cattlemen and miners from Northern Europe arrived and started to make the big changes that characterize the Industrial Revolution around the globe. The record of that arrival can be seen in countless abandoned mines and waste piles, roads paved and unpaved, railroads, gullied rangeland, and an enormous county dump.
Last summer, some four million tourists did about $75,000 dollars of damage to private land in Chaffee County. Tourist numbers are expected to reach eight million in the next five years and the trail of damage will be more than can be measured by cut fences, trailside trash and new tracks cut by off-road vehicles. The various governmental functions here are cutting some new trails in land management, trying to not only minimize damage but to find ways to let landowners benefit from the modern-day invasion.
Every new arrival makes a change here, and we all have a few things in common: we value being closer to natural surroundings and escaping crowded conditions somewhere else. We also share a history of not understanding the impacts of our arrival. We leave ever-more obvious traces of our activities here, from footpaths and tepee rings to paved roads, from diminishing water supplies to accumulating trash. In the last few years, piles of discarded plastic food containers, clothing and camp gear in the hills surrounding us record the brief presence of the wandering people discarded by our culture and economy.
Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” We hope things won’t change too drastically in our lifetimes, but the fact is, we are at a crossroads and no matter which path we take, drastic changes are in our future. Our way of life is destroying the systems that support it, globally and locally, and a profound change in direction is now critically necessary. We have two choices: continue down the paths of disconnection (consumption + waste=fragility) or turn toward reconnection (regeneration + diversity=resilience). So how do we identify a regenerative path?
Vino Salida is a local business founded on building connections. Winemaker Steve Flynn took his hobby passion to the commercial level in 2009, starting small, engaging neighbors for seed money, building his business within his community, and combining resilience and persistence in the face of setbacks to create something new here.
Steve understands wine as a connector, not just for connecting friends enjoying a glass at the tasting room, but for connecting people to the winemaking process, from the bottle to the grape stomp at harvest, to Colorado vineyards and their growers, right down to the soil around the roots.
It’s about “terroir”; territory. Locale. Belonging to a special place on the Earth. A glass of wine from a Colorado vineyard contains something unique produced by the region’s soil and the weather in the vineyard during the year of the harvest. It is a trail connecting the vineyard to the glass. A local wine communicates something missing in a wine made to meet a certain price point or sales volume or preconceived taste. Maybe there’s magic in the glass fermented from the thousands of hours of imagination, hard work and lessons learned from preparing the vineyard soil, through nurturing the vines and the crop, caring for the harvest until it’s in the winery’s barrels, then watching over the grape juice until it becomes wine ready to bottle.
The weather in Colorado is less forgiving than in France or California, and that means different grape varieties thrive here. The vinifera strains bred over the centuries since the Roman occupation of Europe frequently don’t survive our sudden shifts of temperature: early warm spells in spring that expose buds to late frosts, early frosts in the fall before the grapes are ripe, root-killing sub-zero cold in early winter. You won’t find a Zinfandel or Cabernet Sauvignon labeled as a Colorado wine at Vino Salida. Other varieties, like Riesling and Cabernet Franc and cold-hardy hybrids are better representatives of Colorado’s terroir.
Last year was a case in point: an early freeze virtually eliminated the vinifera harvest and almost all of the hybrid varietals. A few growers had some grapes available, and because Steve has a record of staying with small producers and not simply buying from wherever a particular grape is available, he had top priority for the rare 2020 crop. One grower, Bruce Talbot, was able to freeze crushed grapes in an unused dairy, so in March, Steve was thawing and processing Colorado grapes… a prime example of local resilience.
Vino Salida sits in two crossroads: the intersection of US 50 and US 285, and in the intersection of very different paths to the future. Take the fork in the road!