Wagon Tracks from the 1800's Still Exist!

man i cannot imagine climbing these hills and some crude wagon i'm in the southern part of colorado and it's a beautiful morning it's cold but it's beautiful and my goal is to find a pretty incredible piece of history i love when there are opportunities to be able to look back into the past and hopefully if i can find it today will be one of those days this rock is probably nine feet tall something like that and the wind has just eroded this away this is one of the smaller ones but i wish i had a tripod to show you i mean you could almost seek shelter in these things during a bad rainstorm looks like something from mars all right i finally found them but i'm glad i had some trouble because i was able to see some of those really cool rock formations but this is it i mean you can walk out here there's no signage that tells you where they are and if you're not really paying attention certainly if you're not looking for them you would walk right past them so this is what is left of the old spanish trail that was established right around 1829 and it was mostly used as a trading route for the mexican settlers who used to trade with the native americans and it went from what is now santa fe new mexico all the way to what is now los angeles california as they would make their way over this rock this is a ash from an ancient volcano it's a soft rock and those wheels actually wore down tracks into the rock here and we are looking back in time from somewhere in the mid-1800s right now i mean try to picture yourself out here crossing this land no roads nothing it's uh rugged i can't imagine trying to pull a wagon or a cart over these hills over these gigantic boulders and just or around them and just squeeze through everything most of the wagons or most of the carts i should say that were used on this trail were called carretas or carretas that's my non-spanish accent there and they were usually loaded up with heavy items you know wood or something like that and they were pulled by oxen so you can imagine how heavy those carts were and uh just imagine those ox oxen pulling these carts over these hills and slowly but surely those wheels to those carts wore down these rocks i mean that is so cool look at this this one rut this is at least a foot and a half deep how cool i can only imagine that these smaller little cuts into the tops of the rocks could be from the bottom just bottoming out scraping the rocks now this is really only on this ancient volcanic ash here estimated to be over 30 million years old so this there were old volcanoes here that erupted this is ash that sat here and over the course of all those millions of years it solidified turned into stone into rock but it um you know it's pretty soft it's probably almost like sandstone where it's you know it weathers away you can see a big chunk here worn away and you know who knows when this was worn away maybe a big wagon came by and whacked that thing you know as the wagon scraped across scraped the sides so that ash i'm talking about volcanic ash is right here it's pretty much all over the place but this is what it is so it's it's from people walking on it it's it's broken up so it breaks up pretty easily it's not exactly the strongest type of rock let's see how far it goes for you can hard it gets harder and harder to see but you can definitely still see remnants and it's certainly not the only area that you can see this in the country but it's the first area that i have seen in my life and uh like i said i'm in southern colorado and there are places like this in oklahoma and kansas nebraska but uh this is supposed to be one of the best places just because how deep these are and how obvious they are once you find them there's really not a like i said there's not a lot of signage out here you're kind of on your own it's about maybe a mile and a half to two mile hike out here beautiful beautiful area to give you an idea on how hard it was back then to cross this area it was once called the longest crookedest and arduous trail in america i wonder if anyone's ever had a metal detector out here i wonder if you could find some old coins or tools who knows weapons knives bounced off of the wagons well if you'd like to come out here yourself if you're ever in the southern colorado area this is called the penitent canyon wagon tracks penitent canyon is filled with all kinds of interesting things i showed you a bunch of the rock formations in fact this is a very well known area for um rock climbing and things like that but uh it doesn't seem like too many people come out to see the wagon tracks i think this is the coolest part this is amazing any kind of old history like this that's somewhat preserved very cool all right well like i said just a short video uh i'm gonna get back on the road i have a couple more really cool things to see up in the mountains in colorado so oh and by the way just a shameless plug it's cold out go get yourself a sweatshirt the link is down below thanks you

Channel: Mobile Instinct 2

Views: 622,706

Keywords: oldspanishtrail, mobileinstinct, atlas obscura colorado, americanhistory, places to see in colorado, wagon tracks from 1800s, Penitente Canyon

Id: QRSBJc3uHXI

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020