Basic geography

I always liked the concept of the TV show Supernatural. I was a pretty big fan for the first few seasons, I lost the plot a bit during the writer's strike and never really recovered to see what the devil they were doing in the fifth season. I know that it ran for a total of, what—fifteen seasons or something crazy like that before finally ending just a year or two ago. Sometimes a show isn't well-served by continuing to run after it peaks and kinda does what it sets out to do, cf. The X-Files. Although arguably that show never actually got around to doing what it set out to do. 

Anyway, because I liked the premise of the show quite a bit, and I think that in particular the first few seasons explored it quite well before getting dragged into the "we can't get off the ride because it's too popular" trap as well as the weird soap opera thing that seems to happen to every dumb show on the CW (at least, as far as I know, Supernatural never got woke and tried to make Sam or Dean gay or trans or recast one of them as a black person or something idiotic like that) I started watching it again this weekend. I was spending a lot of time at home waiting for my wife and son to get back in town, my daughter was often at work, and when I wasn't watching General Conference, I wanted something to do. Anyway, I had to laugh a bit at a detail in the very second episode. Sam and Dean are leaving somewhere in California to go to coordinates that are called Blackwater Ridge in Colorado, also referecing Lost Creek. I don't know what Blackwater Ridge is other than a place that was probably made up for the show, but the Lost Creek is an actual Wilderness area in Colorado.

Anyway, there's this scene early on in the episode where Sam wakes up from a dream and he's sitting in the passenger seat. You can see that they are in a thickly forested and very green area, and Dean tells him that they're just outside of Grand Junction, Colorado.

Here's a couple of pictures that I took two years ago while hiking just outside of Grand Junction Colorado...

In fact, in that second, I'm looking out across the valley at Grand Junction itself. As you can hopefully clearly see, Grand Junction is not at all a thickly forested, green area. It fact, it has the exact same kind of scenery one usually associates with the rock-climbing and mountain biking mecca of nearby Moab, Utah; red-rock desert, sage brush, and the trees are stumpy little Utah junipers and pinyon pines, not big, tall, boreal forests. 

There is, however, a Black Ridge Wilderness Area near Grand Junction—similar to the Blackwater Ridge noted above, but it's also red-rock desert scenery and is famous for its arches, not unlike Arches National Park—it is the second highest concentration of them outside of the national park, in fact. But it's nowhere near Lost Creek Wilderness, which is on the other side of the Rockies between Denver and Colorado Springs.

But whatever; let's assume for the sake of argument that Grand Junction and the Lost Creek Wilderness area are smack dab in the middle of some generic Colorado Rockies. The episode spends a fair amount of time in the woods, and it does make reference to the mining heritage of Colorado. Of course, the woods shown are extremely green, mossy and ferny, and no evergreen woods in Colorado look anything like that. In fact, the woods shown are very clearly PNW woods of some kind. Lost Creek has red rock formations, loads of aspens and some high altitude pines, and is generally Rocky Mountain dry. Knowing that Supernatural was primarily filmed in and around Vancouver of course sets this straight, but anyone who's been to the PNW and to Colorado and spent any time at all outside will immediately recognize the difference.

Anyway, I'm not so stick-in-the-mud that I will take issue with the rainy Pacific Northwest forests standing in for Colorado Rocky Mountain forests, but it was the gratuitous reference to a clearly desert biome location that kind of made me laugh, though. Not sure why they threw that in at all, when it wasn't really necessary. I guess you could maybe make the case that they were passing through Grand Junction on their way there, which would be reasonable, but they implied heavily that they were basically in the area when they were in Grand Junction, which wouldn't be true at all.