The Holzwarth Historic Site preserves a Kawuneeche Valley homestead that became a dude ranch. The lot, on the right going south and on the left going north, has vault toilets, and no vehicles go farther. The walk is about half a mile each way on a dirt path, and the cabins open in summer. The stop follows the family from their Denver saloon to the Trout Lodge, and the kitchen habits the site's own nomination describes with some care. Joe Fleshuts, an earlier homesteader, left a cabin and very little else. High on the east wall of the valley, near Bowen-Baker Trailhead, a rhyolite flow shows polygon columns.
The Holzwarth Historic Site lot is about a fifth of a mile on, to your left, a dude ranch that started as a complaint. Watch for oncoming traffic as you turn in. The homestead is a half-mile walk on a dirt path, ten minutes or so each way, with vault toilets at the lot, no cars past it, and cabins open only in summer. To carry on, head left out of the lot. The Holzwarths ran a Denver saloon until Colorado's prohibition law forced it into a grocery, which did worse, and anti-German feeling in the war made the city hostile. In nineteen seventeen they started homesteading here. The dude ranch began with freeloaders. In the summer of nineteen twenty John's drinking friends came up from Denver, so lazy they had eighteen-year-old Johnnie do their fishing for them, and then they quarreled over how to divide the fish. When they left, Mama Holzwarth and Johnnie rebelled. If they were going to wait on guests and clean up after them, they said, the guests could pay. John roared that he'd never let his friends be charged. The Holzwarth Trout Lodge opened anyway, at two dollars a day or eleven dollars a week. It was rough and it was popular. Springs and mattresses were spread on the ground, and guests pulled a piece of canvas over themselves against the weather. Johnnie kept a rod over the kitchen door, and when an order for trout reached the kitchen, he ran to the stream. They also served roast, the site's National Register nomination says, a viand not further identified, since it frequently came from animals poached from the national park, butchered, and concealed high in a tree until taken to the kitchen. In winter they trapped, and with the park's permission they sometimes took predators inside the park, though by Johnnie's account there were differences of opinion as to the definition of a predator. John himself couldn't do much of the ranch work. A wagon overturned on him soon after they moved to the valley and left him crippled, so he studied taxidermy by mail and got good at it. One cabin here belonged to a man who all but vanished. Joe Fleshuts built it about nineteen oh two, chinked it with newspapers, and is believed to have left the valley about nineteen eleven. No record of him survives beyond the homestead paperwork. High on the east wall of this valley, near the Bowen-Baker Trailhead, geologists describe polygon columns in a twenty-six-million-year-old rhyolite flow. We can't promise you'll pick them out from the road, but their height shows ash and lava once filled this valley to that level, before ice and water emptied it.
Photo: National Park Service · Public domain