A Feast Along the Alferd Packer Trail
From Provo, Utah, to Denver, Colorado.
Categories: Renegade Roads
By: Johnny D. Boggs 03/01/2008
Now, I don’t like to second-guess anyone from the driver’s seat of a Ford Mustang with the heat on, but having lived in the Rockies, having been snowed on in July, having broken ice in my canteen in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest in June, having survived a harrowing ride over Loveland Pass, and having frozen my butt off in Leadville in January, that was one bad idea.
We don’t know how many men actually left Utah, but by the time they reached Colorado, they would go down in history as the Party of 21. Only it wasn’t a party.
Delta Dawn
January found them eating barley they had brought with them for their horses. That’s hard to believe if you venture through Delta when farmers are hawking their fruits from roadside stands or tourists are heading over to Paonia for the Mountain Harvest Festival in September, but it can get downright unpleasant during winter. In 1873, there was no Delta County History Museum, no Fort Uncompahgre Living History Museum, not even Davetos Italian Restaurant, and there probably wouldn’t have been any prospectors alive if Chief Ouray and his Ute Indians hadn’t saved their frozen, starving Utah hides.
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