The Santa Fe Trail: Bent's Old Fort over Raton Pass
About 110 miles of the Santa Fe Trail's Mountain Branch on US-350 and I-25, from Bent's Old Fort past the Timpas ruts and Iron Spring to Trinidad, Fishers Peak and over Raton Pass into New Mexico.
The Route at a Glance
At La Junta the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail left the Arkansas and struck southwest for the mountains, and US-350 follows it nearly the whole way, seventy-three miles of two-lane on the line the Santa Fe Railway later chose for its own. This drive picks the trail up at Bent's Old Fort and follows it about 110 miles to Raton, where New Mexico's Santa Fe Trail route carries on.
Susan Shelby Magoffin came this way in the summer of 1846, a trader's wife from Kentucky who kept a diary. She reached the fort ill, with the Army of the West camped outside on its way to take New Mexico, and on July 31, just after her nineteenth birthday, she lost the child she was carrying. She set her own confinement beside that of an Indian woman in the room below, who gave birth about the same time and was soon up and about, and her words hold both sympathy and the condescension of her class. The diary, published in 1926, is one of the very few women's accounts of the trail. In August her wagons went on over the pass.
Out on the grassland southwest of La Junta, Timpas Creek was the first water after the river, and the Forest Service picnic area there, sixteen miles out, sits on the site of a stage stop of 1869 to 1871. A three-mile stretch of the trail, marked by stone posts, runs from it to the Sierra Vista Overlook on CO-71, where westbound traders got their first sight of the mountains. Eleven miles farther on, Iron Spring kept a stage station from 1861 to 1871, and the ruts still show west of the parking lot. All three lie in the Comanche National Grassland, named for the people who, with the Kiowa, Cheyenne and Arapaho, held this country when the wagons crossed it.
The highway crosses the Purgatoire into Trinidad, where the trail rested before the climb. South of town Fishers Peak stands over the pass, and I-25 takes the grade the wagons took, up to Raton Pass at 7,834 feet on the state line and down the other side to Raton. The drive takes about two and a half hours without stops; winter storms can close the pass.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
2 stops along the route, in driving order from La Junta, Colorado to Raton, New Mexico.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let The Santa Fe Trail: Bent's Old Fort over Raton Pass do what it does best.
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