Coyote Valley

Deep History in the High Rockies

Thomas G. Andrews

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674495357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

What can we learn from a high-country valley tucked into an isolated corner of Rocky Mountain National Park? In this pathbreaking book, Thomas Andrews offers a meditation on the environmental and historical pressures that have shaped and reshaped one small stretch of North America, from the last ice age to the advent of the Anthropocene and the latest controversies over climate change.Large-scale historical approaches continue to make monumental contributions to our understanding of the past, Andrews writes. But they are incapable of revealing everything we need to know about the interconnected workings of nature and human history. Alongside native peoples, miners, homesteaders, tourists, and conservationists, Andrews considers elk, willows, gold, mountain pine beetles, and the Colorado River as vital historical subjects. Integrating evidence from several historical fields with insights from ecology, archaeology, geology, and wildlife biology, this work simultaneously invites scientists to take history seriously and prevails upon historians to give other ways of knowing the past the attention they deserve.From the emergence and dispossession of the Nuche—"the People"—who for centuries adapted to a stubborn environment, to settlers intent on exploiting the land, to forest-destroying insect invasions and a warming climate that is pushing entire ecosystems to the brink of extinction, Coyote Valley underscores the value of deep drilling into local history for core relationships—to the land, climate, and other species—that complement broader truths. This book brings to the surface the critical lessons that only small and seemingly unimportant places on Earth can teach.

I

NATIVE PEOPLES

1

EMERGENCE

NO ONE KNOWS for certain when or how human beings first came to the Coyote Valley, but archaeological and ecological evidence suggests that the story of people and nature there may have begun like this:¹

A crisp July morning perhaps 13,000 years ago …

After having spent the previous day walking from the open expanses of Middle Park into the tightening high country above, you awake in a camp pitched the night before along the far upper reaches of a river that Americans would later know as the Colorado. You load up spear shafts, spearheads, scrapers, and your few other possessions, then set off. A few hours later, the morning chill still bites at your face as you skirt around a deep, cold lake, its waters gleaming bright aqua in the brilliant noonday sun. From Grand Lake, you trudge up a small hill—the terminal moraine marking the farthest advance of an immense tongue of ice and debris that had long covered the entire valley above you. You have entered a landscape indelibly shaped by the growth and retreat of glaciers. Even as you move out from camp, scattered remnants of ice sparkle beneath the Rocky Mountain pinnacles above.²

The footprints marking your passage represent the first signs of human life in the Coyote Valley. And yet you are hardly alone here. Your kin, faces brightened by the strong mountain sun, walk behind you. Empty stomachs—theirs and yours—have brought your people deep into the Rocky Mountains. But what is it that pulls you deeper into this raw land pressed hard between looming peaks?

A lifetime spent tracking gigantic beasts has made you a keen interpreter of the tracks and signs they leave. After several hours of following their scat from heap to heap, the piles grow noticeably fresher. Your spirits lift: they cannot be far now.

Moving again—always moving—you leave the creatures’ trail and climb from the boggy valley floor to higher ground. Diminutive spruces and firs dot the jagged slopes. Together with periodic outcrops of rocks, this vegetation conceals your approach.

Fear tempers your excitement. You and your companions have walked too far, penetrated too deep into uncharted territory, to come away empty-handed. If the mammoths and giant bison you are stalking detect your approach, they will thunder off. Worse, the beasts may turn and fight. The quarry you stalk can fend off predators far larger and stronger than you and your kind. The giant bison wields horns six feet long and as thick as your thigh, while the mammoth’s arcing tusks are so immense that a single blow from them can turn your skull to jelly. You and your people know you must strike first and in concert to wound one of these giants. And even then, the hunt will be far from finished. The injured beast will try to run away and hide, forcing you to trail it patiently, doggedly, until the moment is right to unleash a final flurry of stone-tipped spears.³

Late afternoon brings you to a milky blue lake perched beneath high peaks. There at the water’s edge you spy them: shadowy hulks drinking and feasting on the flourishing tundra. You and your companions huddle and plot. The fate of your venture never rests entirely in your own hands. Are ferocious predators such as saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears lurking just out of view? Will your quarries wheel around to defend themselves with horns and tusks? And what of all the beings and forces you can neither see nor understand—will they help or hinder?

Staying downwind and disguising your movements as best you can, you turn your attention back to the present moment, taking a deep breath and sharing a steely glance with your kinfolk. Hands clenching your weapon, you sidle down to the lake shore.

Raising the Rockies, Carving the Kawuneeche

The Coyote Valley was never just a stage on which people acted out the dramas we call history, nor was it a blank book on whose pages people could inscribe whatever story they wished to live out. Instead, the natural world has always organized the contours of human possibility in the Colorado River headwaters. This was as true at the dawn of the Kawuneeche’s indigenous history as it is today.

Mountain building, the Great Exhumation, Pleistocene glaciation, and postglacial biological migrations together shaped the Coyote Valley landscape. Norman A. Bishop photo, MSF Neg. 3755, courtesy of the National Park Service.

Whoever the first people to inhabit the valley were and whatever their destiny, this much is clear: They had entered a landscape at once ancient and new—a place where continuity and change traded blows in a never-ending struggle for supremacy. Any attempt to grapple with the Coyote Valley’s deep past must move from the ground up, starting with the ancient natural processes and events responsible for molding both the valley’s form and much of its content. A succession of four dramatic episodes in the region’s deep history—the rise of the Rocky Mountains around 70 million years ago, the eruption of the Never Summer Mountains starting about 29 million years ago, the carving of the Kawuneeche by glaciers and rivers during the ice ages of the last two million years, and the colonization of the valley by plants and animals after the ice receded roughly 15,000 years ago—together forged the topography and ecology that First Peoples encountered in the Colorado River headwaters.

The Rocky Mountains are a surprisingly recent addition to the North American landscape. Near the end of the Cretaceous period, in the most recent 2 percent of the earth’s history, poorly understood forces began to propel the range upward in what the peerless nature writer John McPhee has aptly called “one of the oddest occurrences in the tectonic history of the world.” By the time the earth ceased its squeezing and thrusting about 45 million years ago, the formerly low-lying heart of North America had risen some three miles above the seas. This phase of mountain building (known to geologists as the Laramide Orogeny or Revolution) exposed long-buried rocks of almost imponderable antiquity. Many outcrops on the flanks of the Coyote Valley date from 1.4 to 1.7 billion years ago, long before multicellular life forms first evolved.⁴

Millions of years of tectonic tumult pressed and pulled previously flat expanses into one of the greatest cordilleras on the planet. Yet the transformative powers of the Laramide Revolution also ramified deep into the earth’s surface. Cretaceous mountain building endowed the floor of the Kawuneeche Valley with its defining structural feature: a pair of parallel, north-south faults separated by a mile or less.⁵

Even as the Front Range of the Rockies was being “jacked up more than four miles from its basement origins,” erosive forces were already grinding these highlands back down. The twin cracks underlying the Kawuneeche offered lower terrain than adjoining blocks of the earth’s crust, so water inevitably flowed toward the valley’s faults. Starting tens of millions of years ago, a stream began to course from north to south, following the same general trajectory as today’s Upper Colorado River, only on a course perched several thousand feet higher in elevation. Yet unlike today’s Colorado, which famously slices and dices its way through canyons and valleys on its long route to the Pacific Ocean, this primordial ancestor loafed lethargically across a landscape choked by ashfall from the inland West’s many active volcanoes.⁶

Some 15 million years of dormancy ensued before the forces responsible for making the Rockies reemerged and powered another phase of mountain building. Just west of the twin fault lines marking the floor of the Coyote Valley, volcanic eruptions and magmatic intrusions gave rise to a new range: the Never Summer Mountains. By the time the commotion calmed down perhaps 27 million years ago, the volcanic peaks of this north–south mountain chain loomed some 16,000 to 17,000 feet above sea level.⁷

The Laramide Revolution made the Front Range; Tertiary volcanism then built the Never Summers. The most spectacular quality of the present-day Rocky Mountain National Park landscape, though, is not its lofty elevation, but instead its dramatic relief. Tectonic forces molded mountain masses, but it took the erosive powers of water and ice to carve out the spaces in which most of the region’s human history has taken place. Geologist Keith Meldahl explains that for tens of millions of years, the Rockies remained so “deeply buried” by “thick blankets of sand, gravel, and volcanic ash” that Colorado and Wyoming “looked like somewhat lumpy versions of Iowa or Indiana.” Even the loftiest mountaintops peaked just one to four thousand feet above their sediment-choked surroundings. The jaw-dropping topography of the present-day high country resulted from intensified erosion during the last 5 to 10 million years. Water, ice, and other forces scoured, dissolved, and carried off immense quantities of material, excising basins, cirques, valleys, and other voids from the Rockies in the monumental and still ongoing process known as the Great Exhumation.⁸

Rivers newly energized by another bout of tectonic uplift dominated the Great Exhumation’s early phases. During the course of millions of years, the South Platte and its tributaries scooped out a massive basin beneath the Rockies’ eastern slope. Known as the piedmont—a geographic term meaning “foot of the mountains”—this “vast, riverine bowl” today lies almost a thousand feet below the highest parts of the High Plains. In this fertile trough pressed between mountains and plains, plants and animals—including the West’s First Peoples—could generally find better shelter, more plentiful and reliable supplies of water, and a milder climate than prevailed in either the flatlands to the east or the mountains to the west. As the South Platte was carving out the piedmont, the ancestral stream that had long flowed atop the Coyote Valley’s faulted floor linked up with the newly emergent Colorado River system. By the onset of the Pleistocene some 2.6 million years ago, the great rivers of the West had “bulldozed away the debris that had covered the mountains, and brought the Rockies back to the world.”⁹

During the repeated cycles of glaciation and deglaciation that defined the Pleistocene epoch, flowing ice joined running water as a major erosive force. The preglacial landscape of Rocky Mountain National Park, a recent guidebook to Colorado geology points out, “was undoubtedly scenic, but it lacked the grandeur that today draws millions of annual visitors.” During cold climatic phases, ice accumulated at the heads of the valleys of the Never Summers and the Front Range. Gravity then set these bodies of ice in motion. Streams of ice coursed down from the high country into the valley scraped out by the ancestral Colorado River, producing an immense glacier 1,500 feet thick and twenty miles long. Each episode of glacial scouring lowered the floor of the Coyote Valley a little farther; each whittled away at the cirques that indent the peaks and ridges of the Front Range and Never Summers. By the peak of the last Ice Age about 20,000 years ago, the colossal Colorado River Glacier had submerged virtually every stretch of ground from present-day Grand Lake up to between 11,000 and 12,000 feet above sea level.¹⁰

The Ice Age Valley. Courtesy of the National Park Service.

Roughly 14,500 years ago, renewed warming forced the glaciers of the Rocky Mountains to beat a rapid retreat. As the ice melted, hundreds of ponds and lakes formed in the region’s cirques, bejeweling the upper elevations of the Greater Rocky Mountain National Park Ecosystem like so many sapphires and emeralds. When the climate entered a short but severe cold phase known as the Younger Dryas between about 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, ice began to advance once again. By the time this last gasp of extensive glaciation drew to an abrupt halt, ice and water had together refashioned the physiography of the Coyote Valley into pretty much the same basic U-shaped form that visitors to Rocky Mountain National Park encounter today, with the flat bottomlands along the Colorado River rising abruptly to form the slopes of the newer Never Summers and the older Front Range.¹¹

The ecology of the place that emerged from beneath the glaciers remained utterly unrecognizable, however, until plants began to take root. Downward flows of water in both solid and liquid forms drove the Great Exhumation. The postglacial colonization of the Colorado River headwaters by the forebears of today’s vegetative communities, by contrast, proceeded mostly from lower to higher ground—and hence in a northerly direction from the Kawuneeche’s southern margins around Grand Lake. The hardy denizens of tundra ecosystems presented the major exception to this general rule; having taken refuge above the glaciers, many of these plants began to migrate downward to fresh ground as the climate warmed. Almost all of the area’s other major plants and vegetative communities—hardy sedges and grasses; shrubby, water-loving willows; the aspens and lodgepoles of today’s upper montane zone; and the firs and spruces that would eventually dominate the subalpine—migrated upward in successive waves, shifting their range steadily with each generation in response to climatic shifts, bark beetle outbreaks, and other processes and events.¹²

Throughout the ice ages, a scant but hardy fauna had clung to mountain refugia above the glaciers. The greening of a world long dominated by ice and rock, though, soon drew larger creatures back to the Coyote Valley. In the wake of the Ice Age, the so-called Pleistocene megafauna (mammoths, giant bison, saber-toothed cats, giant beavers, and so forth) pursued newly available plant foods—and each other—into the Colorado River headwaters. By perhaps 11,400 years ago, however, almost all of North America’s largest mammals had died out. The cause of this epochal extinction event remains hotly disputed, with suspicion falling on rapid climatic change, overhunting by First Peoples, epizootic disease, and even asteroid impacts. No one knows how long it took, but the Kawuneeche’s bestiary eventually stabilized. By roughly 10,000 years ago, the valley was sustaining a panoply of birds, insects, fish, amphibians, invertebrates, and small mammals; a bevy of the hoofed herbivores collectively known as ungulates, including elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and perhaps pronghorn antelope and bison; and a predator guild whose larger members included martens, bobcats, lynx, wolves, mountain lions, black bears, grizzly bears, and, of course, coyotes.¹³

Complex and dynamic ecological relationships linked the organisms actively colonizing the Coyote Valley to each other and the physical world. The emergence of the so-called beaver-meadow complex in the Colorado River headwaters offers an especially vivid illustration of the systems of interdependence that First Peoples encountered when they pushed into the Kawuneeche. As the Colorado River Glacier retreated, beavers pursued aspen and willow, two favored sources of food and building material, up into the Colorado River headwaters and began to construct lodges and dams. Wherever beavers labored and thrived, rich riparian ecosystems gained a foothold. Willows, which had evolved to spread onto soil that is fresh, rich in minerals, and moist, readily colonized the sediments beaver dams impounded. The rodents even unwittingly abetted the spread of some willow species by chomping off their stems and carrying them to new sites, where they soon took root if left undistu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Map: Rocky Mountain National Park and the North American West
• Introduction: Coyote Creek
• Part One: Native Peoples
• Part Two: Settlers
• Part Three: Feds
• Conclusion: Seeing the Forest and the Trees
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index