SILVER MINING SURVIVOR

Creede Colorado Navigates Economic Transition While Preserving History

- STEVE VOYNICK

Creede’s Bachelor Historic Tour loop showcases 17 miles of the old mining district and spectacular mountain scenery.

After the ores played out, the fortunes of the West’s legion of frontier-era mining camps diverged. Most became ghost towns, while those that survived through various forms of economic transition did so at the expense of their mining heritage. An exception among the survivors is the legendary silver-mining boomtown of Creede, Colorado.

Although Creede’s last producing mine closed 35 years ago, its mining and mineral heritage is alive and well today. Along with a rollicking history and spectacular mountain setting, Creede’s attractions include a historic mining district with an underground-mine tour and an underground mining museum, collecting sites, the main street lined with Victorian-era architecture, and specimens of unusually beautiful metal ore. Combine all this with mine-drilling contests and an underground rock and-mineral show, and this old silver camp becomes an ideal destination for rock hounds, mineral collectors, lapidaries, and mining-history buffs.

Creede is perched at the lofty elevation of 8,850 feet in southwest Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, a relatively young range of 14,000-foot-high peaks that formed well after the Laramide Orogeny had uplifted the Rocky Mountains 65 million years ago. Following the Laramide uplift, magma accumulated beneath what is now southwestern Colorado, “doming” the entire region upward. About 40 million years ago, after the eroded dome could no longer contain the underlying magma, a lengthy period of intense volcanism built the San Juan Mountains.