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There are probably worse places I could have high-centered my truck. I hear the desert roads of the Western Sahara are quite remote. The old Pamir Highway in Tajikistan, with its landslides and drug traffickers, is no place to be stranded. Every road in Wyoming comes to mind.
But by Colorado standards, this felt like trouble. I was halfway down Forest Service Road 600 when my truck’s frame skidded to a stop, settling atop a mound of crud, my right front wheel hanging precariously in the air. In a matter of seconds, the gravity of my situation sunk in. I was 10 miles from Creede as the crow flies—but I was not flying.
Before I beached my Chevy, I was crawling at five miles per hour across the rocks, ruts, and muddy vestiges of the 13-mile, four-wheel-drive doubletrack that connects Wheeler Geologic Area to the outside world. I’d been repeatedly warned about this road. Surrounded by the La Garita Wilderness, I hadn’t seen another vehicle for hours. I had no cell service. I was alone, save for my skittish cattle dog, Barry, who would offer no help in dislodging the vehicle.
We were hardly the first to be stranded here. Wheeler offers uniquely magnificent scenery, so much so that in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared it Colorado’s first national monument. But getting there has always been a pain. The road’s rugged condition—and the tendency of travelers like me to get stuck—is one reason visitation to Wheeler slowed to a trickle and why, 75 years ago, President Harry Truman signed an act abolishing its status as a national monument.
A quick internet search reveals what makes Wheeler so compelling: hundreds of towering, tapered rocks rising like specters from the ground. Some call them Dante’s Lost Souls. But now, surveying my run-aground Chevy, I felt my sense of adventure melt away. I cursed myself for not being more careful. I cursed Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman. I cursed the entire American forest management apparatus. But I reserved most of my anger for the damn supervolcano that created this slippery plot of earth in the first place.
The rock formations in Wheeler Geologic Area are natural wonders unlike anything else in Colorado. “Spires and domes, castles and cathedrals, mosques and temples, with their fluted columns and wonderfully carved friezes, were arrayed in a confusing panorama of form and color,” wrote Frank C. Spencer, supervisor of the San Juan National Forest, after visiting the area in 1907.
Those spires—hoodoos, as they’re commonly called—are layers of volcanic tuff that have been eroding for millions of years, the products of pyroclastic eruptions from the La Garita Caldera, an extinct supervolcano that created the San Juan Mountains. Essentially, a very large volcano erupted nearly 30 million years ago, and its ash congealed into soft terrain that wind and rain have been chiseling for eons, creating what now look like studio props from Star Wars.
It’s hard to know who first laid eyes on the geologic marvel, which has also been nicknamed the City of Gnomes. Wheeler resides in the Ute Indian Tribe’s ancestral homeland, and though there are no petroglyphic records or archaeological evidence of their presence at Wheeler, the area was almost certainly known to the Ute people long before European explorers made their way to the West nearly 400 years ago.
Among the 19th-century explorers was John C. Frémont, a checkered character who led numerous Western expeditions, later becoming a senator in California and a candidate for president. In 1848, one of Frémont’s traveling parties may have encountered the hoodoos while searching for a railroad route in the San Juan Mountains. (They were rumored to have resorted to cannibalism after becoming stranded nearby during a blizzard.)
Almost 60 years later, a Ute sheepherder told Spencer about the unique formations. Spencer formed a scouting party, which included local hotelier Elwood Bergey (who had claimed previously he’d seen them from a distance), and was immediately taken by the unusual landscape, christening hoodoos on their distinctive characteristics: the Bee Hives, the Ghosts, the Cathedral. “The almost endless variety of forms could have made this play of fancy an almost indefinite pastime,” Spencer wrote. He was so enamored he returned home and penned a passionate note to his superiors, arguing for the area to be given national monument status.
Although he never visited the area, President Theodore Roosevelt took that recommendation on December 7, 1908, designating 300 acres of national forest land as Colorado’s first national monument. The area was named for George Montague Wheeler, a cartographer and explorer who surveyed about a third of Colorado but (ironically) never recorded a visit to the monument that carries his name.
Wheeler’s popularity initially increased in the 1910s after its federal designation, attracting hikers and horseback tourists who were promised geologic wonders rivaling those of Yellowstone National Park. From enterprising locals like Bergey, the hotelier, there was even a brief effort to build a paved road from Creede to the monument until the National Park Service, fearing it would put too much stress on the environment, squashed their plans.
By 1950, visitation to Wheeler had plummeted (it recorded only 43 guests in 1943). Even rangers rarely ventured there: The National Park Service oversaw Wheeler from its outpost more than 150 miles away at Mesa Verde National Park. “That’s a long way to go to manage a national monument,” says Mike Blakeman, who lives outside of Creede and spent 41 years working in various roles for the USFS. “The National Park Service didn’t have anyone who could go up there, so even when it was a national monument, the Forest Service was the primary caretaker.”
Truman ended the charade on August 3, 1950, by signing an act of Congress that abolished Wheeler National Monument and officially transferred its management to the USFS. “Ultimately, they made the right decision,” Blakeman says.
The USFS expanded the protected area from 300 to 640 acres, and in 1969, it was renamed Wheeler Geologic Area—a lesser designation meant to preserve terrain of note.
Today, Forest Service Road 600, which stops just short of the formations, is cherry-stemmed, meaning the path has wilderness on both sides. There have been attempts to repair it over the years, Blakeman says, but maintenance only seems to make the route worse. The earth is so erosive, its ashy soil so quick to shift in a sudden downpour, that land managers have come to accept an uncomfortable truth: A trip to Wheeler will never go smoothly.
My journey to Wheeler began with a call from an editor at this magazine inquiring about my vehicle’s drivetrain. There might be an assignment in it for me if my truck could handle the trip. I read a few overlanding blogs about Forest Service Road 600 and paid careful mind to a warning on the Rio Grande National Forest website that prescribed “4×4 vehicles or ATVs” for the road (described as “extremely rough with deep ruts, narrow turns, and some steep hills”).
I figured I’d driven worse, so I set off for Wheeler on a Tuesday morning in early October. I left Denver at 4:45 a.m. and made it to South Fork by 9. Before I drove up to Hansen Mill Campground (the lone trailhead for Wheeler), I called the Creede Ranger Station to inquire about the condition of Forest Service Road 600. The ranger on duty said she had driven her Toyota 4Runner up the day before and found it manageable. At mile 10, though, there was a particularly narrow section. She asked how wide my truck was (answer: wider than her SUV). She wished me luck. My alternative would have been hiking 7.5 relatively flat miles from Hansen Mill to Wheeler on the East Bellows Creek Trail, a more direct approach but also more time-consuming. Or so I thought.
At Hansen Mill, I reset my trip odometer and began the slow climb. I recorded mileage at each tricky stretch, knowing I’d eventually have to return the way I came. At mile six, I barely cleared a series of deep ruts. At mile 10, as the ranger predicted, I narrowly squeezed between a stand of pines. After covering 13 miles in three hours, the Wheeler parking area—a wide dirt turnaround—came into view.
Just before hiking up to the formations, I heard hikers’ voices in the distance. I introduced myself to Lisa and Craig Conner and their 20-year-old son, Dan, who had hiked from Hansen Mill. They’d also traveled from Denver and, in Lisa and Craig’s case, were returning to a place they’d visited together nearly 30 years earlier. Before their day was over, they would trek nearly 18 miles. “It’s cool that it’s hard to get there, that it’s still rugged,” Lisa told me when we spoke again months later. “We didn’t see anyone else hiking, not a soul. We’ve done a fair bit of hiking all over the world, but we’re always going to remember that.”
I followed the trio up the approach trail, and after a steep half-mile climb, the main event was upon us. I’d seen hoodoos in New Mexico and Utah, but the spires at Wheeler were astonishing and familiar in a way I couldn’t place at the time. Each outcropping was different, but the most visibly striking of the bunch were skinny and tall—ashy gnomes balancing pointy rocks on their heads. (Later, it hit me: They look a lot like the mushrooms a parking lot drifter might offer you before a Red Rocks concert.)
The Connors eventually departed so they could get back to their car before dark, and I had Wheeler to myself. Hiking the three-mile Wheeler Loop Trail above the formations through a spruce-fir forest, I realized I hadn’t been alone this deep in a wilderness area in ages, if ever. The trail beneath my feet narrowed to a foot wide, with grass overtaking the path in some sections. I heard only the wind blowing through creaky treetops and Barry’s mild panting. The silence was soon overwhelming, even eerie, an experience that’s getting increasingly rare in Colorado. This was, after all, the whole point of a wilderness area.
But for some, Wheeler has grown too busy. Blakeman, who says he’s visited about 50 times in his life, hasn’t traveled to the area in three years. “Wheeler’s been discovered by more people over the past 20 years,” he says. “It’s now known, and it’s on people’s bucket list. People are getting towed out of there every year.” He notes that outfitters in Creede and South Fork rent ATVs to visitors who deteriorate the access road and increase pressure on the area’s fragile geology.
On this autumn Tuesday, though, I enjoyed what folks like Blakeman had once found easily at Wheeler. I thought about camping near the monument, but dark clouds were rolling in, and I had no interest in driving a slick road the next morning. At 4 p.m., I set off, trying to remember which sections might give me trouble.
As I approached the most rutted area, I guided my wheels to the right side of the road, easing the front end down a steep embankment. That’s when my frame landed on the rut. I reversed. No dice. I shifted into four-wheel low. Nothing. I had basic recovery and survival tools on hand: a shovel, a hydraulic jack, tow straps, camping gear, and a satellite messaging device. What I really needed—a winch—I did not have. I tried not to dwell on the prospect of spending the night in a disabled vehicle, or the expense of a recovery.
Examining my tires, I realized that by cranking my steering wheel hard to the left and reversing in four-wheel low, I might get enough traction to pop my frame free. I shifted and slowly hit the accelerator. The engine whined, the rear wheels pulled like draft animals, and in one holy motion, the front tires engaged and the whole truck rose up. Reversing out of the rut with too much speed, I scooted backward across the road into a bush. Free at last, I pointed my truck toward civilization.
When I returned to Hansen Mill, there was enough daylight to make camp and steady my nerves. A journey that started in the early morning darkness at my home in Denver transported me millions of years to a world where volcanoes and their ashy remnants ruled the landscape. The experience also had me thinking about the generations of land managers who have kept Wheeler so rugged, the way we access wild places, and how we encounter misfortune within them.
In Colorado, the easiest way to see our natural wonders is often turning over an engine. With some regret, I thought about what I might have seen had I walked in. I also thought about how close I came to disaster on my way out. Mostly, though, I thought about those wild spires rising out of the earth and how I’d like to see them again.
When that day comes, I’ll hike.
