Four people lingered on, including the E. J. Harpers. He had been postmaster in 1904 (see the photo at the end of my introduction) and had conducted business from one end of their own cabin. She served meals at the other. On inspection trips to the Loch Lomond reservoir my father and I used to tie our horses outside this cabin and have a delicious lunch. In 1960 it was being used as a summer cottage but its exterior lines were identical with Father’s 1904 photo.
In 1934 Alice, like many other Colorado gold camps, experienced a renascence. (This was because of the price of gold rising from $20 to $35 an ounce.) The sturdy log cabins were re-roofed; the mill started, and the pit was turned into a real glory hole. Today Alice is unique because of its abandoned glory hole—the only summer resort-ghost town to boast of one within its town limits....
Returning to Clear Creek and driving farther up its course, is another tumbling tributary, a creek also coming in from the north. Originally this creek was called Lyon’s, but now Lion. It flows through the town of Empire about which the splendid historian, Ovando J. Hollister, said in 1866, “Of all the towns brought into existence by the famed Cherry Creek Sands, Empire bears away the palm for a pretty location and picturesque surroundings.” This statement is particularly true of North Empire, about a mile and a half up Lion Creek and its fork, North Empire Creek.
Bayard Taylor (the renowned nineteenth century lecturer and travel writer) and William N. Byers, founder and editor of the Rocky Mountain News, also visited the two towns that same year and were much impressed with their settings. Byers reported North Empire as “a hustling busy little hamlet right amid the mines. It has three or four mills.”
He also mentioned by name a number of prosperous mines, especially the Atlantic owned by Frank Peck who was later the founder of Lower Empire’s Peck House (now the Hotel Splendide). Byers was interested by an arastra in the gulch which was operated by water power and “was pointed out as a paying institution.”
Lower Empire was organized in the spring of 1860 by a band of prospectors who came up from Spanish Bar (then on the south side of Clear Creek close to its junction with Fall River). The first gold was discovered on Eureka Mountain, northwest of Empire. A find of rich placers and lodes soon followed on Silver Mountain, north of Empire. It was these mines that caused North Empire to spring up on the side of Silver and the flanking mountainside to the east, Covode.
E. S. Bastin, 1911; U.S.G.S.
Too late to alter: now proved to be Russell Gulch.
ALICE BOASTED OF ITS GLORY HOLE
In 1911 two mills, the Anchor and Princess Alice, and six mining companies were operating when this view was taken. It looks southwest along the road that runs past the Glory Hole and eventually to the Loch Lomond Reservoir system, built and owned by G. J. Bancroft in the early 1900’s. The 1960 view of the Glory Hole shows three roads at upper right: two up to Yankee and St. Mary’s Glacier, and one off to Idaho Springs.