La Plata County, Colorado

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LA PLATA POSTCARDS: Upper left: The Needle Range of the San Juan Mountains. Upper right: Engine No. 481 returns from Silverton. Far left: Roadside scenery between Bayfield and Durango. Left: The Southern Ute Bear Dance is a popular local event.

We still have the Indians (the Southern Ute Reservation occupies approximately the bottom third of the county), plus a venerable Hispanic community and a passel of distinctly non-urban cowboys. Add merchants, tourists and outdoor sports (a recent issue of Outside magazine, in an assessment awash in hyperbole, ranked Durango eleventh among their pick of the top 15 outdoor "sporting towns" nationwide); a four-year liberal arts college, with its 4,200 students and staff; more realtors, land developers, oil- and gas-drilling companies, and their lawyers, than you can shake a monkey wrench at; a creative core of professional artists, photographers and writers; a dribble of crystal-gazing New Agers and a dabble of salon-tanned yuppies—and you have some idea of the cultural and philosophical diversity of La Plata County, Colorado, in 1989.

Kayaking the Animas right through Durango is popular.

Durango itself has 20 city parks and playgrounds, a modest in-town ski area, 2,832 hotel and motel rooms, two hospitals, 75 doctors, 25 dentists, 40 churches and a similar profusion of drinking establishments, an 18-hole golf course, a hot springs, an almost-daily newspaper and several broadcasting stations, including a public-radio affiliate.

Within a 20- to 40-mile radius of Durango you can tour a unique national park (Mesa Verde with its cliff-hanging Anasazi dwellings), explore a huge national forest (the San Juan), hike a designated wilderness area (the Weminuche), wait in lift lines at a world-class alpine ski resort (Purgatory), boat and fish dozens of clear-water lakes and streams, observe a blessing of wildlife and breathe some of the cleanest air in the Lower Forty-Eight.

Of all these things and more, we brag loudly. We're less boastful, however, of the 2.3-million-cubic-yard mountain of radioactive mill tailings presently being evicted from its longtime home at the edge of town, where it has radiated embarrassment for decades, and trucked to a "containment cell" located on state wildlife lands in nearby Bodo Canyon.

Also relatively unsung are the facts that our winters are tediously long and white, with an annual average snowfall in Durango of 74.8 inches, a figure which increases significantly with altitude (my place at 8,000 feet, 13 miles northeast of town, gets 190.3 inches); that Durango's summer traffic is frenetic, and downtown public parking is painfully tight; that rental housing is in short supply, and g ood jobs are scarce as fur on a trout; that because Durango is a tourist town, the local pay scale is low; that because Durango is a tourist town, the cost of living is high; that the number of homeless and street people is growing; that the soil is generally poor; that reliable water can lie deep (my well is down 278 feet for a piddling five gallons per minute), and drilling permits can be hard to come by; or that the county is already pocked .with 1,730 gas wells, with drifters racing helter-skelter to sink hundreds, perhaps thousands, more before they're finished.

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