Yup, and that nicely paved road which the branch crosses and many others like it in the region are the reason for that abandonment.

The oil boom in the San Juan Basin is often credited (and rightly so) with saving the entire San Juan Extension from total abandonment by the DRGW in the 1950s; however, few people today seem to realize just how bad the roads in (and to) the Basin truly were in those days and just how necessary the railroad was for getting freight into and out of the area, particularly when the weather was less than pleasant. (Al Perlman may have said that the Extension was only good for carrying "cornflakes and bedsprings", but it could certainly do better than that and would have been if he hadn't been obsessed with turning the DRGW into a fast-freight bridge line connecting the WP and MP! Losing the narrow gauge would have hurt a lot more than just the oil companies' operations in the Basin, that's for damn sure!!) Of course, that all-weather link (slow as it may have been) provided by the narrow gauge was its own undoing, since it also brought in the materials and equipment used to turn the dirt and gravel roads into paved all-weather roads, which allowed trucks to carry freight that had rode in and out on the railroad. Having direct all weather road links to Gallup, Albuquerque, and elsewhere eliminated the main reason for the San Juan Extension's existence long after the rest of the "Narrow Gauge Circle" had passed into the history books.