Augerino

The augerino is a legendary worm-like creature of Colorado ranching and lumbering communities, especially in the dry country of Middle Park in the Rockies. In the tales it is a huge, indestructible, corkscrew-shaped animal that tunnels underground and needs dry soil to live. It is blamed for boring through dams, irrigation ditches and reservoirs so that water drains away, and its burrows are said to be lined with glassy silica so they never collapse.

The legend was recorded by folklorist Ronald L. Ives, who in 1941 published his study of folklore in eastern Middle Park in the Journal of American Folklore. He had already used the stories as the basis for a humorous 1938 piece, “The Augerino Oil Company.” Ives noted that some residents seemed half-serious about the creature, and he recorded the comment “the ditches still leak, don’t they?”.

The name comes from the auger, a boring tool. Ives suggested that belief may have been boosted by fossil snail shells of the genus Laxispira, whose spiral shape earned them nicknames like “Devil’s corkscrews” or “fossil augerinos”. In 2008 paleontologists named a spiral fossil burrow Augerinoichnus helicoidalis in the creature’s honor.

Modern coverage, such as Denver Gazette features, treats the augerino as a quiet, offbeat Colorado legend, quieter now than the state’s Bigfoot stories but still a good example of how ranchers explained mysterious water loss.

A very large, worm-like animal shaped like a corkscrew or auger, said to be nearly indestructible and to leave glassy tunnels behind it.

Dry soil, ditches, dams and irrigated hay meadows of Middle Park and other drier parts of Colorado, always underground.

The augerino is a rare piece of Colorado folklore that was recorded by a professional folklorist, and it shows up in lists of Western fearsome critters and in the state’s newspaper Halloween features.