Augerino

Region/Culture: Colorado and the drier western United States (ranching and lumberjack folklore; Middle Park, Colorado)
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A gigantic, corkscrew-shaped, indestructible worm that bores through the ground and drains away any water it can reach.
Role in Mythos: The folk explanation for why dams and irrigation ditches in arid Colorado would not hold their water.
Relation to Humans: Blamed by ranchers and farmers for the constant, unexplained loss of water from their ditches and reservoirs; an unseen adversary of frontier irrigation.

A Colorado rancher walks his ditch line in the grey of early morning, the way he does every morning, and the water is gone again. Last night it ran full and clear down from the headgate; now there is only a dark stain in the dirt and a silence where the trickle should be. He crouches, works a handful of soil, and finds it dry as ash a few inches down. Somewhere under the cracked ground, the old men say, the augerino has been at work, turning and turning through the earth, drinking the ditch dry and corkscrewing away before the sun came up.

The augerino belongs to the folk tales of the ranching and lumberjack country of the dry American West, and to Colorado above all. Its name is a small joke with a serious face, taken from the auger, the spiral boring tool every frontier household knew, dressed up with an Italian-sounding ending into something that almost passes for a real animal. That is the whole conceit of the creature: a tool turned into a beast. It lives underground, it needs the land around it dry to survive, and it cannot abide standing water. So it goes looking for the water that men have gathered, bores into the walls of their dams and the banks of their ditches, and lets it all run out into the thirsty earth.

The fullest description comes from a 1941 survey of the folk tales of Middle Park, Colorado, which recorded the augerino as a gigantic, corkscrew-shaped, and altogether indestructible worm. Accounts of its size and look never quite agree, but the survey added one memorable detail: the creature was said to line its burrows with a silica substance, glazing the tunnel walls so they would not cave in as it drove forward. It is a curiously practical piece of monster-lore, the kind of detail a person would invent who had spent real hours watching ditches fail and wondering exactly how the water was getting out.

That, in the end, is what the augerino was for. Irrigation in the high, dry valleys was a constant, maddening battle against seepage, and a leaking ditch is a hard thing to argue with. When a man asked whether anyone truly believed in the worm, one resident is supposed to have answered with the unanswerable: “Hell, the ditches still leak, don’t they?” The augerino was an explanation that fit the evidence a farmer saw with his own eyes every season, and it carried, under the tall-tale humour, a genuine frontier exasperation with water that would never stay where it was put.

The folklorist Ronald L. Ives, who knew the legend well and even spun a short fiction from it in 1938, offered a gentler origin for any sincere belief. He pointed to the fossil record: spiralling shells of the ancient snail Laxispira turn up in the rock of the region, and such corkscrew fossils were sometimes called “Devil’s corkscrews” or, tellingly, “fossil augerinos.” A rancher who pulled a stone screw out of a hillside might be forgiven for thinking he had found the remains of the thing that drank his ditch. The worm even left a mark on science in the end: in 2008 a newly described helical trace fossil from New Mexico was named Augerinoichnus helicoidalis, a quiet scholarly nod to the indestructible Colorado worm that never existed and never quite went away.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the augerino?

The augerino is a legendary creature from the ranching and lumberjack folklore of the dry American West, especially Colorado. It is described as a giant, indestructible, corkscrew-shaped worm that lives underground and bores through dams and irrigation ditches to drain away the water, which it cannot tolerate near its burrows.

What does the augerino look like?

Descriptions vary, but the best-known account, from a 1941 survey of Middle Park, Colorado, calls it a gigantic corkscrew- or auger-shaped worm. It was said to be impossible to kill and to coat the inside of its tunnels with a glassy silica substance so that they would not collapse.

Why did ranchers blame the augerino for leaking ditches?

Irrigation in arid Colorado constantly lost water to seepage, and a steadily draining ditch was a real and frustrating problem. The augerino gave that loss a culprit: an unseen worm boring holes in the banks and dams. As one resident reportedly put it, “Hell, the ditches still leak, don’t they?”

Did people actually believe the augerino was real?

For most it was a tall tale, but some belief seems to have been sincere. The folklorist Ronald L. Ives suggested this came partly from fossils: spiral shells of the ancient snail Laxispira, found in regional rock, were known as “Devil’s corkscrews” or “fossil augerinos,” and could be mistaken for the remains of the creature.

Where does the name “augerino” come from?

The name is built from “auger,” the spiral boring tool, given a diminutive, almost animal-sounding ending. It captures the creature’s defining trait perfectly: like the tool, the augerino is imagined as a turning, drilling thing that screws its way through solid ground.