Southern discomfort: hard times hit La Veta Cuchara.

• Author: Lewis, David

DAVE BALDWIN HOLDS COURT

IN HIS CUCHARA COUNTRY STORE

AS HE HAS FOR 35 AUTUMNS, SITTING, WITH A CUP OF COFFEE AND A CUSTOMER NAMED NORM, BELOW SIGNS THAT READ, "THE GEESER'S KOFFEE KLUB" AND "THE WEEZER'S KOFFEE KLUB." BALDWIN OPENS THE STORE AT 9 A.M., AND EVEN IN EARLY AUTUMN IT IS COLD ENOUGH AT 8,650 FEET TO WANT A COFFEE AND A MORNING PAPER. A COUPLE OF OTHER CUSTOMERS DRIFT IN TO BUY THE NEWSPAPERS. THE COFFEE'S FREE.

"The Denver Post and the News and the Pueblo paper all stopped delivering last Sunday," Baldwin calls out. The news-hounds walk out. Then another three customers ask for newspapers over the next hour, and Baldwin begins to lose his bonhomie.

"They don't deliver this time of year," he grumbles. "Come winter we're just not important enough for them anymore."

It's a little thing, but the little things are piling up in Cuchara because of a big thing -- the prospect of a third straight winter without the Cuchara Mountain Resort ski area, and the odds that this winter the U.S. Forest Service will close the ski area forever. When you pile on everything else that has happened since the resort folded -- drought, the flagging tourist economy, Sept. 11, "All of Colorado is Burning" -- you've got a recipe for an economic meltdown.

Ask any local when John Lau, owner of Cuchara Mountain Resort, closed it down, and the date pops out with no hesitation: July 5, 2000.

Cuchara property values dropped 30 percent when the ski mountain closed, according to figures compiled by Huerfano County Assessor Louise Sandoval. Now the situation has been made worse, if possible, by the knowledge that the resort's last gasp is at hand -- or is it?

Cuchara may be sending out big recessionary ripples, but it's just a little unincorporated area at the foot of the Cuchara Pass on the Scenic Highway of Legends, which is the long way to Trinidad. Motorists approach it by turning off Interstate 25 into Walsenburg, the seat of Huerfano County, Colorado's fifth poorest county by median household income.

Its nearest neighbor is La Veta, population 900, which sits in the Cuchara Valley in the shadow of the Spanish Peaks, two huge mountains known to the Utes as Wahatoya, or Two Breasts. Radiating from the mountains are more than 400 giant walls of rock called the Dikes of the Spanish Peaks. Some of the formations are 14 miles long and 100 feet thick, and their natural beauty is enough to serve as a tourist attraction in themselves: No wonder the second-home...