a hard winter

Pike and his crew where not prepared for a harsh, January winter in the unforgiving Wet Mountain Valley. Foralmost two weeks, they slowly trudged South, looking for a way to go west through that great wall of mountains we now call the Sangre de Cristo.  It is , the southern most subrange of the Rocky Mountains. They emerged from the mountains at the edge of the Great Sand Dunes on January 28, 1807. They were in the San Luis Valley in the heart of winter.  It was a miserable and grueling experience.  For five days they travelled south in the valley, crossing the Rio Grande and continued until they came to the Conejos River, a tributary to the Rio Grande, at a place where warm springs flowed out of the ground and kept the river free of ice. This is where they built Pike's Stockade  and prepared to last out the winter.