The Real South Park

There is a real South Park, and it has nothing to do with a cartoon. The South Park basin is a vast, treeless grassland in Park County, central Colorado, sitting at roughly nine thousand to ten thousand feet and covering about a thousand square miles. The Mosquito Range closes it to the west and the Front Range closes it to the east, and the basin cradles the headwaters of the South Platte River.

Spanish explorers and early trappers called it Bayou Salade, meaning salty valley, for the mineral springs on the basin floor. The main town, Fairplay, was founded in eighteen fifty-nine by prospectors who resented the generous claims given to the earliest prospectors. The short growing season ruled out farming, but the grassland suited cattle and sheep, and ranching has continued there ever since.

A hot springs resort operated near the town of Hartsel for many years. Trey Parker grew up in nearby Conifer, and Matt Stone is from Littleton. They met at the University of Colorado in the late nineteen eighties.

When they created their animated show, they named the fictional mountain town South Park and drew its isolated, quietly peculiar character from the high-country culture they had both grown up around.