The Ute People and the Shining Mountains
Near Vail, Colorado
Long before there was a resort, a pass, or a highway, this valley belonged to the Ute people, who called themselves the Nuche. For thousands of years the Utes were the people of these high mountains, and Colorado's central ranges were their summer home. Families moved up into the high country each warm season to hunt bison, elk, deer, mountain sheep, and antelope, then dropped back down to lower and warmer ground for the winter.
They knew this land in a way no visitor ever could. One of their most lasting marks on the landscape came from fire. The Utes deliberately burned the valley bottoms most years to bring up tender new grass that drew grazing animals, to make travel easier, and to open sight lines across the country.
Those repeated fires actually shaped the forests you see today, favoring lodgepole pines, whose cones are sealed with resin and open mainly after the heat of a fire. So this landscape is not purely wild. It was gardened, over centuries, with flame.
In eighteen eighty-one the Utes were forced from most of Colorado onto reservations, but their long presence here is written into the very trees on these slopes.
