The Artful Engineer

Heading west from Trinidad, Colorado, you can drive an 82-mile half-circle on what is known as the “Highway of Legends.” Early along this route we passed the vast coke oven ruins at Cokedale, above, which was a bizarre and unexpected feature. These are the remains of 350 ovens, arranged on both sides of two nested arcs stretching across the valley. Summarizing the bit of reading I did, coke is essentially purified coal that is made by baking the right kind of coal at high temperatures. The resulting product is used in smelting iron ore. The ovens have an almost Roman-aqueduct appearance and are quite striking. Since these were close to Trinidad, I just returned the next morning to photograph them. The winter coloring of the grasses goes well with that of the ovens themselves, and adds to the feeling of decay. Compositionally, I think a slightly higher viewpoint would help, but it wasn’t obvious to me how to achieve this without a drone. (I’m not interested in having a drone, but admit that one would be handy now and again.) Getting close to the ovens also seems theoretically promising, image-wise, but I’m unsure whether this is a good (or legal) idea despite seeing that some YouTubers have done so in the past. I would like to put some more thought into exactly when I would like to return (time of year and time of day) and scout some better vantage points.

On the other side of the highway from the coke ovens is what appears to be a long culm pile. Some sources say that it is a slag pile, but slag is the waste product of smelting whereas culm is the waste product of coal mining. Regardless, the long resulting hill almost looks like a gigantic dune of black volcanic sand. Not a lot is growing on this other than some grasses. In the following image, I don’t know the function of the stack of timbers—they look like railroad ties—on the ridge line.

For this next image, I used the slope as a background for a silhouette of a dead tree. This is a little different than many silhouettes because the subject is in shadow rather than being backlit. This is why the tree itself has a blue color cast whereas the black soil in the background has a warm color cast.

This next image could just as well be a volcanic beach viewed from above:

On the relatively short drive from Trinidad to Cokedale, there were a remarkable number of interesting derelict vehicles. I would have liked to spend more time photographing them, but at that point I was still hoping there would be a little snow at Cokedale (alas, there wasn’t). It was early in the morning, too, and everyone around Trinidad seems to have dogs that bark hysterically if you park on the road within a quarter mile. Not wanting to be a nuisance, I moved on after a few minutes.

This was a great old truck in front of a cute old store:

This lot was full of the front halves of quite a few old trucks. They were placed to be easily visible as you drove by—I assume on purpose—and made a pretty enticing subject. There was quite a jumble, though, which made for a somewhat cluttered scene.

In the end, I decided that the crop above made one of the better images. I toned down the brightness of the background and removed a few distractions. The yellow sign matches the yellow truck body, obviously, but I also like the irony of the sign’s advice to call the repair service of a company that has not existed since 1984.