Cochetopa Pass: the old 'Pass of the Buffalo' over the Divide

Drive northwest out of Saguache and the sagebrush flats lift you, almost gently, toward a low saddle on the Continental Divide. The name on it is Cochetopa, a Ute word usually translated as “pass of the buffalo.” Long before any road, big game and the people who followed them wore a trail across this crossing, and it stayed a working route as wagons, surveyors, and toll-road builders came through. In the 1870s, after the Brunot Agreement opened the San Juans to mining, Otto Mears pushed his Saguache and San Juan Toll Road over Cochetopa toward Lake City.

Today there are two passes a few miles apart. The easy one is North Pass, paved State Highway 114, which most cars handle in any season. The quieter one is the old Cochetopa Pass itself, Saguache County Road NN14, a maintained gravel-and-dirt backway that climbs from the Saguache side through the Rio Grande National Forest to about 10,067 feet at the Continental Divide, the boundary where the Gunnison National Forest begins to the west. It is a beautiful, history-soaked detour in dry summer and fall, but it is not a winter road. The county typically keeps it closed in spring to protect the surface, and snow shuts it down, so check conditions before you commit.

For current road status and forest details on the Saguache approach, see the U.S. Forest Service’s Rio Grande National Forest site.