The Rocky Ford Melon That Became Candy

You're rolling through the San Luis Valley, the highest and largest alpine valley in the world, sitting at seventy-five hundred feet between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains. This is a place where the Ute people harvested wild game and gathered piñon nuts for centuries, where Spanish settlers brought sheep and acequia irrigation systems in the sixteen hundreds, and where Japanese American farmers, displaced during World War Two, forever changed what grows in this high desert soil.

The San Luis Valley is potato country first and foremost. More than half of Colorado's potatoes come from these fields, where the cold nights and warm days create dense, starchy tubers that fry up perfect. You'll also find quinoa growing here now, some of the only commercial quinoa in North America, brought back to the region where it was actually grown by indigenous peoples centuries ago. The valley's known for its grass-fed beef, its heritage pork, and increasingly, its craft beer made with valley-grown barley and that impossibly pure mountain water.

But the sweet tradition that defines this region is the Rocky Ford cantaloupe, grown just east of here in the Arkansas River Valley, which has inspired everything from ice cream to hard candy to a festival that's run every August since nineteen seventy-eight.

Here's the story: In eighteen eighty-one, a farmer named George Washington Swink brought cantaloupe seeds from the East Coast to Rocky Ford. The combination of sandy loam soil, snowmelt irrigation, and those dramatic temperature swings between day and night created a melon so sweet, so perfectly balanced between sugar and perfume, that by nineteen hundred they were shipping them to the finest hotels in New York and Chicago. The whole valley got into melons after that.

When candy makers in the region wanted to create something distinctly Coloradan in the mid-twentieth century, they turned to that melon. You'll still find Rocky Ford melon hard candies, melon taffy, and melon-flavored saltwater taffy at shops throughout the valley. The best is the simple melon candy made by small-batch producers who use real melon essence, not artificial flavoring. It tastes like summer concentrate, like the memory of biting into a cold wedge at a roadside stand.

Keep your eyes open as you head east. Melon season runs July through September, and there's nothing quite like the real thing.