Audio Excerpt

If you look to the east, you’ll see the impressive Parry Peak. Okay, okay. You’re in Colorado, which is full of impressive peaks. But Parry Peak is super-duper impressive because it’s a thirteener—meaning it’s over 13,000 feet in elevation—AND it lies along the Continental Divide Trail.

The Peak is part of the Arapaho National Forest, named for the Native American Arapaho tribe that called the Colorado Eastern Plains home. The peak itself gets its name from Charles Christopher Parry, a botanist who made extensive studies of the Colorado mountain flora in the 1860s.

Just to the North East of here you can see a mountain range. Way back in 1862, Rollins pass was discovered, which was used for wagon trains. The route between the Colorado Front Range and Middle Park was used by settlers to drive cattle over the continental divide.

If you traveled even further back in time, you’d see this pass was used by Native Americans for game drives. This area was a natural low crossing that enabled communal hunting of large game, including big-horn sheep and elk.

A game drive system was a prehistoric hunting strategy where game were herded into areas where they could be hunted in groups. Can you name another animal Native Americans hunted using this method?

 

Was it A—alligator, B—Buffalo, or C-deer?

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If you answered B for buffalo, you’re correct! A buffalo jump is another example of a game drive. Herds were driven over cliffs, effectively sending the animals to their death. This was an effective way to hunt a large number of buffalo at once. A buffalo jump is also known as a “pishkun”, which is a Blackfoot Indian word meaning "deep blood kettle".