Not far from my home town, about 30 miles, used to be one of the largest towns in Northern Colorado. Back in the late 1800s, before the national currency standard was changed to gold, silver was a well-sought after precious metal, and Teller City was the epitome of boom towns. According to local history, Teller City was home to 1500 miners and their families. It boasted dozens of saloons, hundreds of log cabins, and a forty room hotel. In a short time, after silver was no longer the currency in the USA, it dwindled to a fraction of its population. By the early 1900s, it was abandoned, and left to the effects of time and the elements.
Another boom town that had gone bust. According to local legend, many structures were still standing all the way into the 1960s. It was said that tables were set and china was left where it had been at the last meal of the few remaining inhabitants of town. Today, after varied governmental philosophies on preserving places such as Teller City, only a handful of cabins remain, now crumbling into the ground. Gone are the buildings like the hotel or the storied saloons. Dirt floor shacks are now overgrown with pine trees. Wild strawberries and raspberries grow in the area that has been clear cut in recent years, exposing more cabins than the light of day has seen through the shadow of the forest which had grown thick since the 1950s, when the area lumber was harvested last.
Foundations and even fallen in basements indicate where the town took hold at the foot of the nearby mountain where a rusty plume of mining tailings show where the silver was dug out. It’s almost impossible now to imagine what a town of 1500 people looked like in its heyday. There are no signs of roads or streets. Only the crude and crumbling walls of raw hewn lumber and a plethora of rusty cans, tin shingles, and the glittering remains of shattered liquor bottles and crockery. Former policies in land management opted to tear down buildings that were “a danger” before preservation was considered all that important to our heritage. Now the area is protected, but that also means it is being left to the passage of time and the cruelty of the elements, taking it back to how it was before the area was mined or settled.
My yellow lab Penny came with me on this adventure and learned the joys of wild strawberries, which she eventually sniffed out and bit right off the runners. The ongoing drought and unseasonably dry summer has already sent the raspberries to seed and gone was the expected drone of quarter-sized horseflies or mosquitoes which usually plague the forests of North Park at this time of year. It had been over ten years since I had visited Teller City. It felt like a whole other lifetime ago. My oldest kids were still small and my youngest had yet to be born. I carried my daughter around on my shoulders, helping them up to the top of the buck and rail fences which were still new back then for pictures. We had driven our Ford station wagon over Skeleton Pass from Gould and bottomed out several times. So if you go, be sure to head in from the Rand side of Owl Mountain instead, where the roads are dirt but manageable by non-4-wheel drive cars. County Road 21A will take you through some beautiful country along Jack Creek and the destination is well-marked by signs along the way.
The area is open to let you wander around and look at the ruins and whatever is left of the artifacts that miners left behind. Unlike past generations, which pretty much looted the site over the years, there are no place settings with food left where they were as though time had just stopped. The mountain is taking back the site and eventually, only old stories will remain, along with some rusty cans and shattered plates that the encroaching forest decides to give up as a tease of what once was. If you visit, please be respectful. As the old saying goes, take only photographs and leave only footprints.
Places like Teller City are becoming scarce, especially as land is developed for housing, or ironically enough, cordoned off by public land use policy to keep anyone from enjoying places such as these. The stillness of the site, in the trees was almost meditative. Though I saw no ghosts, I brought with me my own thoughts and found comfort in the solitude I found there on a quiet Friday afternoon of a summer that is flying by much too quickly. Soon the snows will come and those old cabin walls will be buried again, to be revealed in the springtime, just a little bit less than what they once were.
Enjoy it while it lasts. The removal of acres of beetle-killed pines in the area have opened it up in ways that haven’t been seen in years. However, it has also exposed the area to the elements and humans in ways not seen in decades.
I ended the evening with a cigar, watching the sun set from the sidewalk of my house which isn’t much younger than Teller City. I thought about the way that those miners must have lived and the challenges they faced, and decided as rough as the road can be sometimes, we are built to handle it.