Colorado has a lot of well-known national parks.
Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Great Sand Dunes. And it has dozens of state and regional parks.
They’re all easy to find on a map.
But then, there are also OTHER “parks”— that you might not see on a map.
One Coloradan asked CPR’s Colorado Wonders to get to the bottom of it.
“I do a lot of hiking and camping and stuff,” said Dylan Jones, who teaches chemistry at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction. “I just noticed there's a bunch of places called Parks, and I just didn't know what that meant. What made a park a park?”
Great question, Dylan. And one we discovered has an imprecise explanation.
Let’s start at the beginning
I reached out to the University of Colorado’s media office. It referred me to its geography department, who said I should talk to the go-to guy on Colorado geology-slash-geography.
His name is Lon Abbott.
“No, I've never really heard that question before,” said Abbott, teaching professor of distinction in the Department of Geological Sciences.
We met at the Benson Earth Sciences building. It has a pair of carved stone globes at the entrance and all kinds of cool rocks and fossils and photos of mountains in its hallways. And maps!
“We have a lot of maps. I mean, this is a map of the geology of Colorado,” said Abbott, who teaches a class called Geology of Colorado, pointing at one.
But there was an even better map down the hall. Abbott climbed up on a bench to get a better view. This one showed the plains in green and the mountains in brown with white marking the highest peaks.
“The concept of a park is very geographic rather than geologic. Geology forms the parks, but it forms different parks in different ways,” he said.
Pointing at the Rockies and then the West Coast, he gave me a quick lesson on how they were formed.
“So about 65 million years ago, we were under compression here. There was a subduction zone,” said Abbott. Vast pieces of Earth’s crust, called plates, collided at what’s now the far western part of North America. That caused mountains to form, a thousand miles away, in what’s now Colorado.
“What we got was a series of faults that are compressing the crust and just stacking slabs of crust one on top of another,” he said. “And that's what made the mountains.”
As mountain ranges formed, gaps started forming between them, Abbott said. And those gaps became basins between the ranges. Parks!
“And so what you've got is those are the parks, North Park, Middle Park, and South Park,” Abbott said. “And those are, just to a geologist, we would call it an intermontane basin. So intra is in between the mountains.”
Estes Park, he said, is similar, just smaller.
Elsewhere in the west, those features got another name: hole. In Wyoming “it's basically just like North Park, but it's called Jackson Hole, not Jackson Park.”
Names came much, much later
Early occupants of Colorado were hunter-gatherers; areas between the mountains were rich hunting grounds for a variety of residents like the Ute people. Sam Bock, Director of Interpretation and Publication at History Colorado, said wildlife roamed there, including bison.
“Just like the elk and moose and deer, they love the high country grasses just as much as they loved the low elevation stuff,” Bock said. “They would find all kinds of species up there.”
But why did these basins get called “parks,” instead of something else? Bock said he looked into it. “I Googled first, like anyone would do.”
What he found was a bit of a mystery.
“This really wasn't documented. These places aren't designated on the map. They're not official U.S. geological survey designated areas,” he said. “There's no recorded first use of the term North Park or South Park.”
He said the use of the name park likely traces back to trappers in the late 18th and early 19th century who needed to be able to tell others where they were going to be, “whether they were the Indigenous folks who were helping them get pelts or living with the Indigenous folks, or there were other trappers and traders organizing summer rendezvous, which was a really common thing for trappers to do in the west at the time.”
The name “park,” P-A-R-K, comes from the French word “parc,” he said. When trappers arrived there “they recognized them as what they would think of as a cleared land area that would belong to the king or nobles hunting grounds, essentially in England and in Europe.”
You may have a hard time finding a park on the map, but there’s a TV show you may have heard of
Despite earning the names, you’ll have a hard time finding North or Middle or South Park on a map.
In the middle of the basin called South Park, which is located in Park County, there is the town of Fairplay, which was once called South Park City and now has a museum with that name — a name that ultimately became known around the world.
That’s thanks to the Comedy Central TV show set in a Colorado mountain town. The cartoon “South Park” pays tribute to a historical town named after a real place that you might have a hard time finding on a map … unless you’re from Colorado.
