Cochetopa Crossing - CO 114
North Cochetopa Pass to Gunnison, Colorado

What I am calling “the Cochetopa Crossing” is the path Colorado State Highway 114 cuts across the mountains and forests between Saguache and Gunnison. This is a beautiful area with many different types of landscape and tree cover. The Cochetopa Hills are the result of volcanic activity that created the Cochetopa Dome: a would-have-been volcano except that it never reached the surface and never erupted, it only pushed up a significant chunk of countryside. Somewhere around here there was significant lava flow because a lot of the countryside shows dikes and walls of hardened lava and the remains of eroded pinnacles.

The photo to the left is of folds in the rock in Cochetopa Canyon. You can see the different layers of granite and how they were bent and folded by the heat and pressure of bygone volcanic processes.