BETWEEN THE LATE 19th and early 20th centuries, prospectors and pioneer homesteaders flocked to a crossroads called Colorado with dreams of striking it rich in rushes to claim gold, silver, coal and fertile farmland. In the frenzy to colonize a new frontier of opportunity, miners, ranchers and would-be entrepreneurs haphazardly built settlements in some of the state’s most inhospitable locations. Many of these towns brilliantly flashed like meteors in the mountain sky, busting within a few short years of their boom. Other towns gave way to the slow decay of time and neglect. Surprisingly, the extreme alpine and prairie environments that had proved to be too arduous for their original residents helped preserve these towns as they waited to be rediscovered, and in some cases renovated, by younger generations returning for their chance at the American dream. This autumn, explore 11 of the state’s ghost towns that survive today under startlingly scenic canopies of fall foliage, sunflower-filled fields and auras of history as rich as the lucky few who struck the mother lode in the heyday of gold rushes and land grabs.
1. CRYSTAL - Gunnison County
A longtime subject of postcards and calendar covers, the Crystal Mill may be the consummate picture of Colorado’s rustic past. Also known as the Sheep Mountain Powerhouse or Lost Horse Mill, the photogenic building was constructed in 1893 by promoters of the Sheep Mountain Mining Co. Its waterwheel on the Crystal River generated compressed air that miners used to power silver ore extraction machinery. In the late 19th Century the nearby town of Crystal had an average population of 500, but after the Sheep Mountain Mine closed in 1917 the mill fell into disrepair and fewer than 10 people remained. Today, part-time residents help maintain the mill, a jewel on the National Register of Historic Places. They use Crystal’s cabins as base camps for touring the spectacular outdoor recreational opportunities of the Elk Range. Mapping a trip to Crystal requires care. Some GPS navigation units may incorrectly suggest Forest Road 317 as the fastest route from Crested Butte. This road leads over Schofield Pass as well as a precipitous section deservedly called the Devil’s Punchbowl where entire families have perished when their vehicles careened over sheer walls. Crystal can more easily be reached from Marble on the tamer Gunnison County Road 3, though this road also requires a four-wheel drive vehicle.
2. ALTA - San Miguel County
Thank the pioneers of this town near Telluride every time you plug in your toaster. In 1891, creditors were about to take over Alta’s money-losing Gold King Mine. Lucien “L.L.” Nunn, a lawyer representing the mine, had an idea that flashed like a light bulb in his head. Realizing direct current electricity was extremely expensive for the mine to transmit over the long distances of the San Juan Mountains, Nunn turned to George Westinghouse and the theories of Nikola Tesla to construct a new power plant using alternating current methods. The result was the Ames Plant on the San Miguel River below Alta, which dramatically cut the mine’s electric bills. This first commercial use of AC was so successful that lines were strung across 13,000-foot Imogene Pass to power the Camp Bird Mine almost 20 miles away.
Despite these innovations, production in the mines eventually slowed, a fire burned Alta’s primary mill and vandalism took its toll in the mid-20th Century. Nevertheless, visitors may enjoy the same majestic view of 14er Wilson Peak through the windows of Alta’s lingering buildings as the mining mavens of old once did.
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3. ST. ELMO - Chaffee County
When Anton Stark stepped off a train in the three-year-old boomtown of St. Elmo in 1881, he had no idea his family would be its saviors and sole caretakers for 80 years. Stark and wife, Anna, founded a general store and the Home Comfort Hotel, businesses said to be best stocked and cleanest in the otherwise gritty town. Business was good in the years when the railroad shipped tons of ore and passengers through the Alpine Tunnel nearby, but St. Elmo’s decline was swift. Mine production decreased, the tunnel closed in 1910 and most residents took the last train out of town in 1922, never to return.
Even though railroad tracks were removed by 1926, the Starks, hoping the town would boom again, bought up as much of the vacant property as they could. After her parents’ deaths, daughter Annabelle kept the store open and unsuccessfully promoted St. Elmo as a tourist destination. For nearly half a century, she warmly welcomed sparse vacationers who purchased goods from the store’s aging inventory, but also fiercely defended St. Elmo from vandals with a shotgun. Even after her death in 1960, some claim she watches over the town in spirit; glimpses of her ghost are still being reported.
4. IRONTON & RED MOUNTAIN MINING DISTRICT - Ouray County
An unmistakable scarlet shade of oxidized iron stains the mountains near Ouray. Under these peaks, the rusty remnants of some of the most rugged mining settlements in the San Juan Mountains wait to be discovered by motorists on Red Mountain Pass. One of the largest is Ironton, where settlers built 300 buildings in the span of only three weeks in 1883. Ironton’s population climbed Glenn Randall to around 1,000 until the railroad halted stops to the mining district from Silverton. Among the ruins here are homes with peeling white-painted facades and wallpaper still clinging to their interiors.
Nearby, visitors can explore the impressive triangular roof of the Yankee Girl Mine headframe towering defiantly against the harsh elements of the red peaks that surround it.
5. INDEPENDENCE - Pitkin County
At an elevation of 10,900 feet, air to breathe might be as valuable a commodity as precious metals. That didn’t stop prospectors from founding this community after gold was struck at a nearby mine on July 4, 1879. By 1882, there were more than 1,500 residents who discovered living with high country snow was a constant nuisance from October through May. Finally, in the winter of 1899, when a series of severe snowstorms cut off the town from the outside world and residents ran out of food, all but one decided to evacuate.
Half a century before ski resort entrepreneurs figured out how to convert the plentiful white powder into recreational gold, Independence residents tore the siding planks off their houses to use as cross-country skis for the trip down to Aspen. They humorously billed their escape as the “Hunter Pass Tenderfoot Snowshoe Club Race,” with an entry fee of one ham sandwich each. Several log cabins with crooked corridors and narrow doorways remain at the site, but the doorway to visit Independence by automobile is also narrow. It can be accessed just west of the Independence Pass summit on Colorado Highway 82 while the road is open during the warm weeks of summer and early fall.
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6. ASHCROFT - Pitkin County
In 1883, Ashcroft was the toast of mining elite like Horace Tabor, who struck gold a year earlier in the nearby Montezuma and Tam O’Shanter Mines. Reportedly, Tabor and his second wife, Baby Doe, visited Ashcroft to host a grand banquet and buy rounds of drinks for everyone in each of the town’s 13 saloons.
There was such a boom in Ashcroft that three years later there were 2,500 residents (and the number of saloons ballooned to 20). By 1900, Tabor’s mines were tapped out and the party moved to the posh hills of Aspen, leaving only two full-time residents.
Ashcroft survived as a training site for the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division during World War II, and in the mid-1950s husky sled dog trainer Stuart Mace used the town for filming the television series Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
Thanks to continued maintenance by the Aspen Historical Society, Ashcroft is one of the most intact of Colorado’s ghost towns. Easily visited on the paved Castle Creek Road, Ashcroft’s landmark structure is a former hotel picturesquely nestled under an aspen grove with snowcapped Cathedral Peak pointing skyward in the background.
7. KEOTA - Weld County
A visitor to Keota in the early 1900s may have met a real-life cast of characters who inspired the plucky plains settlers in James Michener’s novel and TV miniseries Centennial. As immortalized by Michener, the agriculture and the cattle industry, fed by the Old Prairie Dog Express rail line, flourished here in the Great American Desert between 1880 and 1929.
By the Great Depression, the town’s isolated location as an outpost of what is now the Pawnee National Grassland, the violent storms of the Dust Bowl and crop failings conspired against cattle barons and farmers. Few residents remained, but a skeletal water tower, brick general store, weathered wooden church and concrete foundations of other buildings, including a schoolhouse, still stand.
With a full tank of gas, intrepid travelers crisscrossing the grassland’s dirt roads may discover a cemetery 1.5 miles east of town, the Pawnee Buttes 11 miles north and deteriorating farmhouses abandoned during the Depression scattered in every direction. Amidst the homesteads and broken dreams of pioneers past falling silently into the earth, travelers will also find the grassland alive again with oscillating oil pumps and wind turbines rising in a modern energy boom.
8. TINCUP - Gunnison County
You had to be bad to make it good in Tincup. This boilerplate for all rough-and-tumble Old West settlements began humbly in October 1859 when prospector Jim Taylor panned gold from Willow Creek and carried it back to camp in a tin cup.
Twenty years later when lode deposits were discovered, a town called Virginia City was laid out attracting a population of 1,495. Confusion with other Virginia Cities (in Nevada and Montana) caused residents to change the name to Tincup. This was the end of law and order. The town’s Boot Hill Cemetery started to fill with honest lawmen who fell victim to the town’s rowdy residents. Marshal Harry Rivers died in a gunfight in 1882.
Another marshal, Andy Jameson, was shot to death a year later. Tincup is more hospitable today. Preservation-minded residents have renovated its cabins and operate a seasonal general store, cafe and ATV rental business.
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9. GILMAN - Eagle County
Founded in 1886, this company mining town perched on the side of Battle Mountain had as many as 2,000 residents during its boom years. Half of Gilman was destroyed by fire in 1899, but resilient residents rebuilt, and as recently as 1950, yearly mine production at the site was valued at nearly $13 million. Gilman’s 100th anniversary was not celebrated as a result of falling metal prices and labor disputes with the controlling New Jersey Zinc Co.
In 1984, its residents were forcibly evacuated while the town was to be cleared of toxic pollutants, the consequence of a century of lead and zinc mining. The pollution was rated so extreme that the Environmental Protection Agency placed the site on the Superfund national priorities list. Some residents left so quickly that spare cars still sit in their garages. The town remains off-limits to the public, but the multicolored homes that sit in suspended animation on Gilman’s steep mountainsides can still be seen, surrounded by an autumn rainbow of aspen trees, from U.S. Highway 24 south of Minturn.
10. LUDLOW - Las Animas County
Unlike the hard-rock mining towns of the central mountains, where silver queens and gold kings charmed settlers with glittering promises of becoming overnight millionaires, soft-rock mining communities of the southern Front Range like Ludlow were home to residents with no such illusions of good fortune. Here, King Coal ruled a working class with an iron fist. For most colliers the thought of eight-hour work days, mine safety standards and the abolition of child labor were more unpretentious goals worth fighting for. In 1914, when 1,200 miners went on strike demanding these simple luxuries, Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. strike breakers were sent to harass the miners’ tent city on Ludlow’s outskirts.
Tensions came to a boil on April 20, when guards opened gunfire. Between 19 and 25 people were killed in the “Ludlow Massacre,” including two women and 11 children who asphyxiated under a burning tent. Ludlow became a rallying cry for further strikes and American industrialists slowly implemented more favorable conditions. Ludlow is now abandoned except for a memorial maintained by the United Mine Workers of America and a legacy of labor laws earned by the blood of those involved in Colorado’s “Coal Wars.”
11. ANIMAS FORKS - San Juan County
Townspeople once boasted in an advertisement that Animas Forks was the “largest city in the world.” That claim was punctuated by a caveat in small print: “at this altitude.” Set in a narrow canyon at more than 11,200 feet, the town was targeted by frequent avalanches sweeping like pendulums between mountainsides, destroying buildings and stranding travelers caught in the middle.
Despite this, Animas Forks was once the seat of San Juan County. As legend has it, when a disgruntled defendant threatened to take his case to a higher court, the county judge replied: “There is no such thing. This is the highest court in the United States.”
The town remains a fork in the road separating the Jeep trails of the Alpine Loop leading to the rocky Engineer and Cinnamon passes and State Highway 110 leading to Silverton.
Animas Forks’ most famous structure is the “Bay Window House.” Built by William Duncan, the elegant home was sold to mining magnate Tom Walsh, whose daughter Evelyn was the last private owner of the Hope diamond. However, neither Evelyn nor the diamond is thought to have ever resided in the house.
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