Huerfano Butte, The Orphan

That lone cone rising from the scrubland about nine miles north of Walsenburg is Huerfano Butte, Spanish for the orphan. The name fits. Nothing else stands near it.

Early Spanish travelers noted it in records as far back as eighteen eighteen, and it has served as a landmark on the plains ever since. Geologically it is a plug of alkali basalt, the hardened core of a volcanic intrusion from about twenty-five million years ago. The magma never broke the surface.

It cooled underground, and then millions of years of erosion stripped away the softer rock around it, leaving just this resistant knob standing about two hundred feet above the plain. It has been called the volcano that never was. Comanche and earlier peoples would have used it to navigate these same open grasslands long before any Spanish road came through.