Penitente Canyon rich with artifacts of past cultures
LA GARITA — One of the most popular climbing spots in the state sits in the northwestern corner of the San Luis Valley.
For nearly three decades, sport climbers have beaten a path to Penitente Canyon, where roughly 300 routes have been established on the rock faces framed by pinyon trees and chokecherry bushes.
“A lot of it is driven by the type of rock,” said Sean Noonan, an outdoor recreation planner for the Bureau of Land Management.
That rock, known as Fish Canyon Tuff, was formed by ash deposits from volcanic eruptions more than 30 million years ago and features a rough, gritty surface.
Climbers started coming to the area in the mid-1980s, and its annual use has since ballooned to nearly 40,000 visitors annually.
One of the early climbers during the ’80s was Tom McCabe, who returned from New Hampshire to the canyon with his son, Owen, last month.
“It’s convenient. The climbing is really fun. It’s beautiful,” he said of what draws him to the area.
He recalled visiting in the ’80s with buddies and driving his car up the canyon to the climbing routes.
“We parked right here, rolled out of the car and laid on the ground,” he said.
Since then, the BLM has put in a trailhead with a rock fence, campgrounds and toilets to accommodate the crowds.
But the agency does not maintain the bolts on the climbing routes, Noonan said.
Two years ago, Bob D’Antonio, who was among the first to climb the canyon, returned with a host of other climbers from as far away as Utah and New Mexico, to re-bolt the routes.
While sport climbers made a name for the canyon, Noonan said mountain biking is becoming more common, with many visitors doing both activities.
The BLM created a special management recreation area that includes 17 miles of stacked loop, single-track trail for cyclists and horseback riders that runs through Penitente and spills into neighboring canyons.
When visitors are not clinging to canyon walls or careening down bike paths, they can also take in the history and archaeology of the area.
“It’s a very rich area culturally,” Angie Krall, an archaeologist for the BLM, said.
The canyon and its surroundings contain the largest concentration of pictographs in the San Luis Valley.
One such pictograph is highlighted near the mouth of Penitente Canyon that Krall said has been interpreted by the Jicarilla Apaches as a game drive scene.
The surrounding areas are littered with the remnants of stone game blinds.
Wagon tracks ground into the stone of neighboring Witches Canyon are believed to have come from Hispanic homesteaders who took carts into the hills for firewood.
But the most prominent sign of the area’s Hispanic influence sits just inside Penitente Canyon, where a mural of the Virgen de Guadalupe sits on one of the rock walls.
Krall said the mural came from members of Los Hermanos Penitentes, a Catholic lay fraternity common throughout New Mexico and Southern Colorado, who had a lodge in nearby La Garita.