The Sangre de Cristo Mountains

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains are one of the longest mountain chains on Earth. They stretch from Poncha Pass, Colorado, in the north to Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, in the south. There are ten peaks over 14,000' high in the range, more than two dozen over 13,000'.

Miles and miles of excellent alpine hiking trails through millions of acres of the San Isabel, Rio Grande, Carson, and Santa Fe National Forests. The Sangre de Cristo, Wheeler Peak, Latir Peak, Pecos, and Spanish Peaks National Wilderness Areas are found here.

Some of the best rock climbing, snow skiing and whitewater rafting on Earth are also right here. The Trinchera elk herd is one of the largest in the world. Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep are found all through the range. If it's fly fishing you want, we have Gold Medal waters to offer. There's also the Great Sand Dunes, the Spanish Peaks and three major ski areas.

The Sangre de Cristos are fault block mountains with major fault lines running along both the east and west sides of the mountains and, in places, cutting right through them. The mountains were pushed up about 27 million years ago, pretty much as one big chunk of rock. On the west side is the San Luis Valley with the Rio Grande Rift Zone running down the middle. On the southeast side is the Raton Basin with a quiet but still active volcano field. On the northeast side are the Wet Mountains and the Front Range, areas of pre-Cambrian rock raised up during the Colorado Orogeny some 1.7 billion years ago. The Blanca Massif is also pre-Cambrian rock while the main body of the Sangres themselves is composed of Permian-Pennsylvanian rock, a mix of igneous intrusions, conglomerates and shale that is only about 250 million years old.

On the satellite image to the right, between the Spanish Peaks and Angel Fire you can see the fault lines in the ground: the high ridges of the folds being parts of the Dakota Wall that stretches from Canada to Mexico along the eastern boundaries of the mountainous uplifts (from the Spanish Peaks area north, the Dakota Wall skirts the Wet Mountains and heads north to that area just west of downtown Colorado Springs known as The Garden of the Gods and then continues north along the eastern foothills of the Front Range to the Flatirons outside of Boulder).

There are some pretty big chunks of Dakota sandstone sticking up to the west of the Sangre de Cristo's but those pieces were turned upright about 65 million years ago during the Laramide Orogeny when the Ancestral Rockies first pushed up. So when you look at the ages put on these events by the geologists, what we are seeing now is the results of 25, 27, 65 million years of erosion, glaciation, volcanic activity, and continuing uplift.

When the Spanish Peaks were first formed about 25 million years ago, the top of the West Spanish Peak (which is now at 13, 656 feet above sea level) was about 2 miles below the surface of the Earth. On the west side of the Sangres in the San Luis Valley and running southwards is the Rio Grande Rift. The San Luis Valley itself is a huge gravel pit full of eroded materials from the Sangres on the east and the San Juan Mountains on the west. Bedrock is down about 30,000 feet (with the floor of the Valley at about 7,500 feet above sea level, that bedrock is miles below today's sea level). There is a lot of water stored in all that gravel and, below a certain depth, that water is hot. There are hot springs bubbling to the surface through the center of the San Luis Valley and in spots along the sides of the Rio Grande down almost to Santa Fe. There's also hot springs further south at Truth or Consequences (which used to be known as Hot Springs, NM, before that famous television show from fifty years ago convinced the local folks to change the name).