Here today, gone tomorrow – then, frequently, back again, in a completely different form. Colorado’s many mining ghost towns are the shape-shifters of the architectural world. From potential state capital to tourism and gambling at Central City. Silver mining to celebrity skiing at Aspen, Breckenridge and Telluride. Rough mining camp to ghost town museum at Fairplay. Abandoned mountain town to vacation paradise in artsy Creede. All of these ghosts, and many more, have roared back to life, blurring the line between past and present in entirely new ways.
An actor dressed up for the Wild West at Buckskin Joe at the Royal Gorge in Cañon City.
Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications
They are the lucky ones, the rediscovered gems of Colorado’s rich and rowdy mining history. Hundreds of other mining camps and towns, with populations that once numbered in the thousands, slumber on in mountain valleys and hillsides throughout the Rockies. Today, their only inhabitants are deer and chipmunks and the occasional tourist in search of Colorado’s colorful past.
Former lives
Once these towns were spectacularly alive, swarming with miners and merchants, clergymen and saloon-keepers, lawmakers and lawbreakers. Well-dressed dudes from back East brought capital for the expensive machinery required to dig deep into the earth for hidden and elusive riches. But many of the towns they created were destined to fail. When all the precious stuff was tapped out, the settlements were doomed. The bonanzas that fueled boomtowns were dramatic, the decline often catastrophic. As mineral deposits played out and miners moved on to new fields of dreams, fortunes won quickly turned to fortunes lost, and boomtown became ghost town.
An abandoned mill on the Crystal River, near Marble.
Carol M Highsmith
Those towns built to serve surrounding mining camps never really died. Lake City, Ouray, Silverton, Telluride, Durango, and Denver were close to mines that yielded billions of tons of gold, silver, lead, and other precious metals. They grew into the largest and wealthiest towns in the state and became politically important as supply centers and seats of local and state government.
Today, they are undergoing a metamorphosis. Whole districts of Victorian mansions, company buildings, hotels, bars, and bordellos are now on the National Register of Historic Places. Many have been restored by artists, retirees, and local historical associations and turned into quirky homegrown museums, art galleries, bed-and-breakfasts, bars, and restaurants filled with mine memorabilia.
Handcart passengers on the Cripple Creek Short Line in one of the state’s richest mining districts.
Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Colorado’s mining boom began late, nearly a decade after the California Gold Rush, mainly due to the inaccessibility of the 14,000ft (4,270-meter) Rocky Mountains. The 1859 gold strike in Gregory Gulch attracted fortune hunters who traveled to north-central Colorado’s high-altitude mining camps by whatever means they could, some hauling their worldly possessions up mountain sides in handcarts. It was the construction of toll roads and narrow-gauge railroads in the 1870s that made mining economically viable, linking remote mining settlements with smelter towns like Durango. Today, these historic roads, Jeep trails, and narrow-gauge railroads have been restored and are the mainstay of a new economy – tourism – that has helped revive ghost towns throughout the Rockies.
There are more than 700 ghost towns in Colorado, by some estimates the greatest number in the West. A true ghost town has two characteristics: its population has precipitously decreased, and the initial reason for its settlement, usually a mine, no longer supports the community. Scores are no more than mysterious names on a topographical map, completely unpopulated, with dilapidated buildings, empty schools, churches, and collapsed headframes. Most, though, have a few residents who look after the buildings, conduct tours, and keep alive those forgotten places.
Haunted Colorado
From ghostly beauties tempting train engineers, to dripping mine shafts echoing with the banter of men long dead, Colorado echoes with tales of unexplained phenomena. Leadville historian Roger Peterson has had several close encounters over the years.
His most powerful experience took place in Silverton, where he recorded noises in an old miners’ boarding house. In the night, he was awakened by the sound of someone slamming books on a coffee table in an empty adjoining room. Playing back the tape the next day, he heard a menacing voice, sounding as if it came from inside a well, saying “Share the loot.”
Cheryl Lloyd, caretaker of the Matchless Mine Museum, also tells of strange goings-on at the 1880 silver mine that made millionaires – then paupers – of Horace and Baby Doe Tabor. After Horace’s death, Baby Doe occupied a shack at the worthless mine, surviving on charity from townsfolk and unrequited hope of a new silver boom. In March 1935 she was found frozen to death at the age of 81. But Lloyd says she is still very much present.
Visitors send Lloyd photos taken here, showing unexplained waves, lights, and reflections in the shack. Lights flick on and off, even after light bulbs are removed.
And after visitors tried to sit in an empty rocking chair that already seemed occupied, Lloyd placed a sign on it: “Please don’t sit on me.”
Frozen in time
The quintessential Colorado ghost town is a highly photogenic mining camp at the foot of breathtaking mountains, the faded timbers of its cabins and false-front buildings creaking in the wind and nearby mining tackle falling into a steep ravine filled with wild flowers. Your best bet in Colorado for this type of experience is St Elmo, 24 miles (39km) southwest of Buena Vista in the South Park mining region. Founded in the 1880s, St Elmo was typical of gold and silver boomtowns: it grew so fast that tents standing one day were replaced by hand-hewn log cabins within the week. A few months later, many cabins were supplanted by milled-lumber, false-front buildings. In the early days, if a guest arrived at a not-quite-complete hotel and asked for a private room, the hotelier drew a chalk line around one of the beds and told him that he had even given him a suite.
A supply center for nearby mines, St Elmo was a favorite Saturday night “blow off” town for miners, freighters, railroad workers, and other passers-by. When Mark Twain rode the railroad down to St. Elmo, the brakeman “had some difficulty” after the perilous journey, and Twain declined a return trip. Now the town is somnolent. Miners’ cabins have become summer residences and the main activity centers on insatiable chipmunks cadging handouts from visitors. Eccentric brothers Roy and Tony Stark and their sister Annabelle owned the Comfort Home Hotel and protected the town for decades. Tony and Annabelle were among the last residents of the crumbling ghost town. Since she died in 1960, Annabelle’s ghost has been seen or felt at times, still watching over the town from the hotel windows. The town is now a national historic site.
Village store, St Elmo.
iStock
A ghost town of a different type lies not far from St. Elmo on the outskirts of the former mining camp of Fairplay, founded in 1859 by miners who found themselves shut out of diggings at Tarryall. Opened a century after the first gold strike in Colorado, South Park City is an authentic restoration of a Colorado mining town. Some 28 of its 35 buildings were brought here from all over Colorado, restored, and filled with mining-era artifacts. A schoolhouse straight out of Little House on the Prairie has desks, chairs, and a blackboard. A drug store is so well stocked with remedies, it looks like the movie set of Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. In all, some 60,000 mining-era artifacts fill the buildings.
Nearby Cripple Creek’s restoration was funded in an entirely different way: casino gambling. Slot machines and blackjack tables now fill the historic buildings in this 1890s gold-mining town, which once had a larger population than Denver. For a glimpse of what Cripple Creek once looked like, visit Victor, 6 miles (10km) to the southwest. This former gold town has rare brick-and-mortar buildings, including a two-story school, depot, church, newspaper office, and a once-elegant miners’ club. Its paved streets, dug up during the Depression, were literally “paved with gold” – mine waste from local diggings. Boxing legend Jack Dempsey, who grew up in Colorado, was a mucker at the Portland Mine before becoming heavyweight champion of the world. To view more former mining towns, drive the 122-mile (196km) Gold Belt Loop between Cripple Creek and Cañon City, which winds among the steep gulches of the south slope of Pikes Peak.
The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.
Colorado Tourism/Matt Inden
All Aboard!
Colorado’s narrow-gauge railways add an element of romance to visiting ghost towns in the Rockies. The 45-mile (72km) Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railway brings passengers by steam train from Durango into the heart of Silverton twice a day in summer. The 6-mile (10km) Georgetown Loop Railroad carries passengers between Georgetown and Silver Plume on an hour-long trip on a 1920s-era steam locomotive. The railway links two 1859 mining towns that boomed for 30 years, first with the discovery of gold, then large quantities of silver. Georgetown today is undergoing a renaissance as an expensive retreat for the wealthy, and its downtown historic district has the largest number of preserved historic buildings in Colorado. Several of the more than 200 buildings are now museums recounting the area’s rich mining history. The historic railroad through Royal Gorge, the 1,053ft (321-meter) deep canyon cut by the Arkansas River, begins in Cañon City, about 35 miles (56km) from Cripple Creek. The 24-mile (38km) round-trip offers amazing views of Royal Gorge, one of Colorado’s deepest canyons, and views of the world’s highest suspension bridge, built in 1929. Buckskin Joe, a movie-set town with stagecoach rides, shootouts, and costumed actors.was recreated with buildings from the original mining town, northwest of Cañon City, and entertained tourists for 53 years. In 2011, it was bought by Florida billionaire Bill Koch and moved to his ranch outside Gunnison.
Vanished communities
St Elmo and Victor are two of Colorado’s best ghost towns, but even deserted, decrepit ghosts offer much to see and photograph. Some showcase old railroad depots. Others feature mills, smelters, headframes, tramways, and other mining-related buildings and equipment. Often a boarded-up courthouse or school dominates the site. In many cases, the sole reminder that a town ever existed is its forlorn cemetery, with weathered markers and picketless fences.
In summer, the Alpine Loop links Silverton to communities in the central San Juans, such as Lake City, and the San Juan Skyway – connecting the western San Juans – brings thousands of drivers into the mountains annually.
The 65-mile (105km) Alpine Loop National Back Country Byway linking Lake City, Silverton, and Ouray in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado is filled with abandoned ghost towns. Capitol City, a few miles southwest of Lake City and reachable by passenger car, briefly boomed in the 1870s, when the Galena Mining District brought untold silver wealth to the area. One entrepreneur, George Lee, was so convinced the town was set to become the state capital, he built smelters and a governor’s mansion at the remote site. With the silver crash of 1893, the town was quickly left to the elements and has never been reoccupied.
There are people in the buildings at Animas Forks, but only for a few days each summer, when this abandoned 1870s town, located at an elevation of 11,200ft (3,415 meters) 12 miles (19km) north of Silverton, offers living history days. Costumed interpreters, including a doctor’s wife, a teacher, pioneer children, and the town sheriff, serve lemonade and apple-sauce cake and chat with visitors who arrive by Jeep, mountain bike, or hiking trail.
Animas Forks was once a bustling mining community of 450 people with 30 cabins, a hotel, general store, saloon, and post office. An important mining mill and processing center, it was the San Juan County seat, where court cases were heard. One man who didn’t like the outcome of his trial promised, “I’ll take this to a higher court!” Responded the wry judge, “There is no higher court in Colorado.”
In 1884, Animas Forks suffered a blizzard that lasted 23 days and dumped 25ft (7 meters) of snow on the town. Residents dug tunnels to get from building to building. Silverton, 2,000ft (610 meters) lower, was considered positively balmy and became a popular place to spend the winter. Laid out along the Animas River in Baker’s Park in 1874, Silverton soon became the mining center of the San Juans. The arrival of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad linked it to the new smelter town of Durango, 45 miles (72km) away, in 1882, and Otto Mears’ new toll road allowed auto traffic to continue north to Ouray and Ridgway. Eventually, Silverton was incorporated and became the county seat. Among the many buildings in its authentic downtown historic district (complete with saloons, hotels, stores, and a red-light district) is a lavish courthouse next door to the county museum.
More modern ghost towns
Despite their scenic locations, authentic ghost towns are frequently homely affairs. Colorado’s 20th-century mining boom netted a number of forgettable company towns dedicated to extracting copper, radium, vanadium, uranium, and oil shale to suit the energy and defense needs of an entirely different new century.
Old houses in Animas Forks.
iStock
The town of Uravan on the southern end of the Unaweep–Tabegauche Scenic Byway, which follows SR 141 between Naturita and Whitewater, was built in 1936 by the US Vanadium Corporation. Until the declining market forced the town to close in 1984, some 42 million lbs (20 million kg) of uranium and 220 million lbs (100 million kg) of vanadium were extracted from carnotite rocks here. Today, the place is abandoned, and Umetco Minerals Corporation is undertaking a 15-year, $70 million reclamation project to clean up the mine site.
The fate of Parachute, just east of Grand Junction, is still in the balance. Built by Union Oil Company during the energy crisis of the 1970s to mine oil shale, the multimillion-dollar company town and processing plant was one of the largest employers in the Grand Junction area. The population has dwindled to 1,006 souls, and the town now sits beside roaring traffic along I-70, a forlorn testament to modern boom-and-bust economics in Colorado’s energy-rich northwest corner.