I love the high country of Colorado—and in a less effusive manner, so does Dan Peterson. Partly for your enjoyment and partly for our own, this booklet represents the crystallization of our mutual enthusiasms. We hope that it will serve as a useful guide for you and others who thrill to the heights and diverse grandeur of our Colorado Rockies.
But first, a word of warning: if after reading this booklet, you add one act of vandalism, or carelessly cast one burning cigarette to the winds, or messily leave a beer can in a crystal creek bed, the whole purpose of our publication has been defeated. We have written about ghost towns out of love of their dramatic past and a reverence for their present fragility. If you follow in our footsteps to these mountain spots, we entreat you to go in the same spirit.
When I said this booklet represented a “crystallization” of our mutual enthusiasms, I could not have spoken more truly. Dan is still “hurting,” as he phrases it, because Gladstone, his favorite ghost town, had to be left out due to limitations of space. In order to appease his hurt, I have agreed that he can sneak in its location on the Silverton map and a short paragraph of description in the text.
And what have I had to sacrifice? Too many pets, such as Beartown, reminder of the brave history of Stony and Hunchback Passes; Mineral Point and its lonely sentinel, the San Juan Chief shaft house still perched across a fork of Poughkeepsie Gulch and seen as one jeeps up to thrilling Engineer Pass, and Mayday, where I have never been but am intrigued by its romantic sound.
Our booklet does offer you forty-two “ghost towns” in photograph and story, plus passing mention on a map or in the text of a few others. These forty-two are reached from twenty-two attractive mountain towns where it is possible to obtain good accommodations. All but three of our final choices may be visited by ordinary car. For Lulu City, you will have to walk a three-mile trail or ride a horse; for Bachelor, you may take your car most of the way but will have to walk the last mile or jeep the whole distance, and for Carson, you will have to go by jeep or horse from Lake City. For the most part our forty-two towns are easy to see and in their separate ways unique.
Here, another word of warning: there are almost no ghost towns any more. In the true sense of the word they are gone. If you had been able to ride a horse or were willing to punish your Model T Ford, I could have taken you in the 1920’s to dozens of true ghost towns no farther away than along the Front Range. Even in the late 1940’s, when jeeps first came in, I could still have guided you to many true ghost towns. But no more.
What has happened? Tourists (a mixed blessing) and natives who have no regard for Colorado’s appealing past, have stolen from them, vandalized them, destroyed buildings, and carted whole towns away. Another killer in the form of fierce high-country winters has levelled them under tons of heavy white snow or pulled them apart with snatching, tearing wind. Whether desecrated by humans or eroded by nature, I am constantly reminded of Charles Kingsley’s lines, painted on the Tabor Grand Theatre curtain:
So fleet the works of men, back to the earth again,
Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.
In other cases the ghost towns have undergone a metamorphosis. Some settlements have changed into summer resorts because of the charm of their buildings or the picturesqueness of their settings. Sometimes their ghost town status was lost by a new industry moving in, such as the sawmill at Lenado; or a new motor road has been strategically built, such as the Peak-to-Peak Highway which redeemed Ward. These towns, although peopled only by ghosts for many years, once again throb with life today. Many of the summer-resort group are alive only in the warm months. When the aspens have lost their fluttering gold in the autumn, they return to ghost towns.