Chama, N.M. and Silverton, Colo. are train towns. Their entire economies depend on attracting riders to their historic narrow gauge railroads, which climb high through the San Juan Mountains. The scenery is spectacular, with steep vertical rises and deep snow in the winter. Come fall, when the aspen’s leaves begin to turn, the mountainsides become an intricate patchwork of fiery color.
In the 1980s, Chama saw its sawmill close, and the train became the village’s single largest employer, after many of the mill’s workers packed up and moved away. The same happened in Silverton in the early 1990s, when the Sunnyside Mine, a once large gold-silver-lead-copper-zinc operation, closed.
In conversations in bars or on front doorsteps this summer, I
heard locals complain about the steam engines’ soot filling the air or the hordes of camera-toting tourists, sporting fanny packs equally as obnoxious as they were. The train riders often double the towns’ populations during the height of the tourist season. As a Colorado native, it always saddens me to see half the historic buildings in Silverton inhabited by trinket shops.
If you push most of the residents long enough, they’ll admit that their hometowns would become ghost towns without the trains or the out-of-staters. Without growth, the villages couldn’t survive. On the other hand, most residents insist that the growth be managed.
That fact of life becomes obvious in winter, when the towns sit in depression. By then, the trains have stopped running and the tourists stop coming. Every so often, the snow falls so thickly and so quickly that all roads into town are closed. Many in Silverton have pinned their hopes on a new extreme ski area, but a year-round economy is still far away. The most notable manufacturers in Silverton are relatively new: a ski company and a sled maker.
I grew up in the west- Arizona, Texas and Colorado-and I have been spoiled because of that. When I go home, to a mountain lake near the largest wilderness area in the contiguous 48, I go to a place that many would consider an “escape,” be it from city life, pressure or civilization. It’s a small lake valley, surrounded by dense pine forests, with 14,000 foot peaks at the head of the valley. As the valley grows, and more new people move in, I often wonder where I will ever “escape” to.
“We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Chama’s village librarian said. She threatened to move to Wyoming if a McDonald’s ever came to town. Locals see the new businesses and homeowners-mostly retirees-arriving in their little paradises as harbingers of rising land prices and higher taxes. The locals fear they’ll have to leave their own homes one day, simply because life becomes too expensive in them, and they often blame new residents.
It’s hard to blame them. My father and I have fought a proposed golf course development near our home for almost a year. We’ve only lived at the lake for 8 years, but in that short time, we’ve hiked up all the rivers, stood face to face with deer and elk and survived a 40,000-acre forest fire. If anyone threatened to force us away from the lives we’ve built there, I doubt we’d sit passively by.
