You expect two things on a visit to the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad: trains and mountains. And if you happen to dig deeper and find that this railroad is living history, so much the better.
But during an early June trip with a Trains tour group to Durango, Colo., I found a new living history unfolding because of train tourism that most visitors are likely to miss.
Our group had taken the 8:45 a.m. train from Durango to Silverton. We saw plenty of trains at the roundhouse, in the yard, and ghost trains of retired Denver & Rio Grande Western narrow gauge livestock cars parked on select sidings along the route. Soon enough, distant snow-capped mountains became tall and towering, challenging us to climb them - if we dared.
And then came Silverton: treeless, unpaved, and as Western-looking with its clapboard hotels and picture-window stores as any place in the West could be. After eating lunch and deciding against buying another souvenir, I ambled down 12th Street back to where we would meet the train and head back down the mountains. Along that stretch of sidewalk, I met sister and brother team Raja and Soren Braford-Lefebvre selling rocks out of a red steel wagon.
"Watchya sellin'?" I asked.
"Mineral samples!" Soren, 9, told me. "We have rose quartz, drilling samples, lava rocks ..."
I looked at the rose quartz and asked more about the drilling samples:
Did they drill these themselves? "No."
What were the samples from?"Silver mines."
Did they obtain these legally?"Yes."
"We search for these all over town," Raja, 11, says.
During a negotiation over prices (we settle on $1 each for the sample and rose quartz) Raja tells me they are both life-long Silverton residents and that her brother was born at home because they don't have hospitals in Silverton. And right then, Nick Pohlman, 14, also of Silverton, walked up to interrupt my interrogation. He wanted to know how the children were doing in their sales. Was he their supplier? A local strong-arm? Not at all, Pohlman is a business coach.
According to the teenager, generations of Silverton children have gathered on the main drag on days when Durango & Silverton trains operate to sell rocks to tourists. "It's been going on for a long time, since the 1930s," Pohlman says.
If true, that makes this rock-selling adventure living history on its own terms. Pohlman says good rock sellers can coax $50 to $60 from tourists a day. At $1 per rock or sample, that's good money. Average sellers take in $20 a day.
"I had a $100-day and worked July 4th," he says.
You might think Pohlman is crazy to not be pursuing this gig at which he was working as late as 2014. But it's the law. Pohlman says local ordinances prohibit anyone older than 13 from selling rocks on the street. So until he can petition the Silverton government for a vendor permit he's helping Raja and Soren.
Wow. I didn't expect that.
Money changed hands, I took the rocks, and began walking back to the train when I spotted two more girls selling rocks 100-feet away. I bought a brownish, swirly stone from them believing that my $3 in total purchases helped the Silverton economy in some small way. Still, as I boarded the D&S train and our open sightseeing car, I knew I scored the ultimate souvenirs: stories to share with fellow travelers over smoke and cinders back to Durango.
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