Peak Past is a weekly segment written and voiced by Matt Cavanaugh Ph.D, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and Senior Fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Cavanaugh is a resident of Manitou Springs where he lives with his wife and two young children.
Jeffrey Beall, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
The Midland Terminal Railroad Depot, located on Granite Avenue in Victor, Colorado. The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The following is part of KRCC s Peak Past essay series.
Some roads are too good to go away. Or maybe they’re too tough to die. Like the Midland.
The Colorado Midland Railway was born in 1883. If you’ve ever headed west on U.S. Highway 24, you’ve followed the same route as the first standard gauge railroad built over the Continental Divide. The Midland ran from Colorado Springs out to Leadville, on to Grand Junction. The full line was up by 1890.
Peak Past is a weekly segment written and voiced by Matt Cavanaugh Ph.D, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and Senior Fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Cavanaugh is a resident of Manitou Springs where he lives with his wife and two young children.
The following is part of KRCC s Peak Past essay series.
If history is the study of what came before, a mud print makes a fine artifact.
Especially in the Spring.
Winter’s last blasts are past (hopefully), and those first little green shoots are pushing out of the soil. The wet ground makes a perfect canvas for dirty paw prints.
Recently, my daughter and I found an animal track out by a stream near the Arkansas River headwaters. I don’t know anything about animal tracks, so we hit the books. We picked up a field guide that would help us tell marmots from magpies. The print we found was big, 4-inches by 4-inches. We’d seen coyotes near there, around Leadville, but our guide said coyotes leave smaller prints, and so the print we saw was likely a big dog, but also could possibly have been a wolf.
Wikimedia Commons
Postcard photo of the Denver and Rio Grande railroad depot in Colorado Springs, Colorado from the first part of the 1900s.
The following is part of KRCC s weekly Peak Past essay series.
Have you ever wondered how the West was won?
There’s really only one answer. By train.
Civilization rode the rails into the American West on an iron horse, for good and for ill. Everyone used to ride the train. A hundred years ago, and right up through World War II, it was the thing to do.
That is.until it wasn’t. In the 1960s, passenger rail all but died. In 1970, Penn Central, the largest railroad in the Northeast, approached bankruptcy and planned to discontinue 34 of its passenger trains. It threatened to cripple the economy.