Scary beautiful: Colorado ghost town hikes

The Rockies are full of ghosts, haunting the hills and high valleys in the form of long-abandoned mines, deserted train tunnels and whole towns left moaning and empty in the mountain wind.

They are the ghost towns of the Colorado gold and silver rush, and because many of them are tucked in stunning alpine valleys, they make for fantastic outdoor destinations.

St. Elmo is perhaps the best-preserved ghost town in the state. It sits at 10,000 feet in the Collegiate Peaks west of Buena Vista, wedged between steep slopes skirted in evergreens and topped with bare rock. The main street looks much like it must have in the 1880s when the town was a thriving mining hub with 2,000 residents.

The general store and other shops, with their proud false fronts hiding rumpled tin roofs and crooked stove pipes, line the plank sidewalks. A platoon of privies stand back a few steps from each building. The rough pine-plank blacksmith shop still guards the east end of town and the town hall, with its bell tower and small jail, still guards the west end.

But the doors are shuttered, the windows are mostly boarded up, and there is no sign of the gangs of carousing miners that would descend on the town from surrounding valleys on weekends, pay in hand, for what Sandra Dallas, author of “Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps,” called, “Raunchy Saturday-night sprees.” The people are gone.

Like many other ghost towns, St. Elmo’s existence was bound to the mines. Once the gold played out, so did everything else. By the 1930s there were just a few residents. By the 1950s there were none.

But St. Elmo is not a true ghost town. It is more of a mummy town — a dead town carefully preserved for the afterlife. It can seem like the still, clean silence of the Rockies is enough to embalm a place like this forever against the effects of time. But walk down the plank sidewalk, taking a closer inspection of the buildings, and you’ll see modern hands at work. Log walls have been lovingly chinked against the wind. Some of the roofs have been reinforced with new sheets of metal, and the 1880s school house has been meticulously refurbished, right down to the historically correct Pledge of Allegiance (without “Under God,” which was not added until 1954) scrawled on the chalkboard. These are the works of a long line of preservationists, including local individuals and a nonprofit called Buena Vista Heritage, that have worked tirelessly to keep time and the harsh mountain elements from erasing St. Elmo entirely.

Besides mummy ghost towns, the region also boasts zombie ghost towns — dying towns that suddenly come back to life, focused on feeding on the brains of the living, or at least their wallets. Black Hawk and Cripple Creek are good examples.

But for a true ghost town, continue past St. Elmo on a narrow road that snakes even higher into this alpine valley. The route was once the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad, where engines steamed through the valley, carrying supplies and ore. Five miles above St. Elmo, it stopped at the town of Hancock.

Hancock also flourished in the 1880s, topping out at about 200 people. It had more than its share of saloons huddled near the tracks. But unlike St. Elmo, little is left.

From its perch at 11,000 feet, the treeless basins of the Continental Divide stretching in every direction look as they might have 130 years ago, but the only remains of Hancock today are faint files of boulders that look almost straight enough to have been foundations, and a few hand-hewn logs walls, tumbled on the tundra like pickup sticks and silvered by decades of sun and storms.

We like to tell ghost stories where the past — what was dead and gone — comes back tohaunt us. But the more disturbing story is that the past does not come back; it tunnels further and further into time until it is lost. All we can do to keep it alive is haunt the past from time to time, walking through these old ghost towns, and imagining what the past must have been like.

St. Elmo townsite
To get there
Take U.S. Highway 24 west 70 miles to U.S. Highway 285. Turn left and drive 13.5 miles to a T-intersection. Turn left and continue south on 285 for 5.6 miles to County Road 162. Turn right and drive 15 miles toward the mountains, entering Chalk Creek Canyon. The road will turn to dirt and narrow, but remains graded and passable to all cars. The road ends in St. Elmo.

What to see
St. Elmo is a nice place to get out and explore without too much walking. The main street has a number of stores and houses — a few of them open in summer. Check the last houses on the left as you walk up the main street; descendants of the original owners have often been in town in recent years, sometimes living months on end in the old cabins. One block north of the main street, look for the fully restored schoolhouse.

Mary Murphy Mine
to get there
Backtrack less than a half mile and turn right onto County Road 295 and drive 2.5 miles up to a marked intersection for the mine road (County Road 297). Park here and walk 1 mile and 600 vertical feet up the mine road to the bunkhouse and tram station of the Mary Murphy Mine, once a major gold and silver mine.

What to see
The Mary Murphy Mine operated until 1926, pulling gold from deep in the mountainside. The large building on the hillside is not a shaft house, but a way station on a chairlift-like tram that brought ore down from the high ridges to the railroad below. The flywheel can still be spotted in the wreckage. Downhill from the tram is a bunkhouse where miners lived.

Hancock townsite
To get there
From St. Elmo, bike or cross-country ski up County Road 295 five miles to a marked pullout on the left. If you have time and energy, follow signs two miles farther up the old railroad grade to the Alpine Tunnel, which became the first tunnel through the Continental Divide in 1882.

What to see
There is not much left of the town (just a single tumbled cabin) but along the way you’ll see the precarious Allie-Belle mine, which stands over the road, and a few abandoned mine cabins that dot the woods. The alpine tunnel, which operated until 1910, is sealed, but the scenery is spectacular and well worth the trip. Expect four-wheelers in summer and Snowmobiles in winter.