Archuleta County covers 1,356 square miles of the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. The county is bordered to the north by Hinsdale, Mineral, and Rio Grande Counties; to the west by La Plata County; to the east by Conejos County; and to the…

Located in the southwest corner of Colorado just north of the New Mexico border, the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area is home to hundreds of archaeological sites. One of these sites, the Chimney Rock Pueblo, is known for its dramatic setting high atop…

Fort Lewis was a US Army post in southwest Colorado that operated from 1878 to 1891. The post had two locations: the first, Camp Lewis, in Pagosa Springs and the second south of Hesperus. Camp Lewis was founded in 1878 and moved to Hesperus in 1880…

“Great House” refers to a class of ancient Ancestral Puebloan structures from the ninth through thirteenth century. Great Houses were monumental, geometrically formal constructions, with thick stone masonry walls made with careful craftsmanship. While…

Built sometime in the 1880s or 1890s, La Casa Ruibalid is a Territorial adobe house on the Rio Blanco about ten miles south of Pagosa Springs. Believed to be the second house built in the Rio Blanco area, it was occupied throughout the first half of the…

Home to the deepest hot spring aquifer in the world, Pagosa Springs was a popular destination for local Native Americans before it developed into a white settlement in the 1870s. The area supported a thriving lumber industry in the early twentieth…