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Ghost Towns of North Park
As we get closer to the spooky season, you might want to check out ghost towns of the Colorado mountains. Jackson County has several just waiting for you to check out and envision how things might have been a hundred years ago or before! North Park has a long history of mining, riding the ebbs and flows of the boom and bust days stretching back to the gold and silver rush and even to fossil fuel mining in the area. You can still see the remains of these times in the many ghost towns scattered throughout North Park.
Teller City
Perhaps the most well-known of the ghost towns in North Park, Teller City shares its namesake with Teller County in central Colorado. In 1879, silver was discovered in the mountains of southeast North Park. At the time, Jackson County was still part of Grand County, and many boomtowns in the area—such as Lulu City—were also producing silver.
At its height, Teller city had hundreds of temporary cabin and tent structures, the Yates Hotel with its 40 room accommodations, and over two dozen saloons! Teller City even had its own newspaper and post office, though law enforcement was a tenuous situation at best. 1500 people called Teller City home for the years it was in operation.
A town of mostly single men, with some bringing their families along to strike it rich in the silver mines, Teller City was as rambunctious as it was profitable. Freight was brought in by stage and mule teams from Laramie, with some of these roads still visible on the plains east of Walden today. Like many other settlements in Colorado at this time that relied on silver production, the bottom dropped out when the US Treasury switched to the gold standard. Teller City went bust, with many of its citizens leaving overnight to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The population dropped from over 1500 in 1884 to just 300 in 1887. By 1902,Teller City was completely abandoned.
Vanished, and Left Everything Behind
According to local legend, many of the homes were left as they were, with plates and silverware left where they lie, ready for supper. Today, nearly all of the structures are gone, with only a few cabins and the foundations for some of the larger buildings remaining. The pine forest has continued to reclaim this once thriving town over the last 100 years. Up in the hills surrounding Teller City, you can still find the remnants of the silver mines and some of the equipment used to mine and haul the ore.
Access to the ruins of this ghost town is easiest through the National Forest south of Rand, CO, about 30 miles south of Walden. Or you can also take a 4WD road over Skeleton Pass from Gould, CO to reach Teller City. Today you’ll not only find what is left of structures, but also artifacts from the mining days. Broken crockery, bottles, and other signs of frontier life. When you visit, please leave artifacts where you find them so that others may also enjoy our heritage.
Pearl
Much more remains of Pearl than Teller City. On the way to Big Creek Lake, you’ll find the small ghost town of Pearl, which got its start in the 1890s as a mining town. Postmistress Peal Wheeler is the town’s namesake. Unlike Teller City’s silver, copper was in high demand when Pearl took off. Copper is the same mineral that made Butte, Montana one of the richest cities in the United States at the same time. Not only was copper useful in manufacturing, but the boom in electricity throughout the USA required refined copper for electrical wiring and machinery. The ore of three mines was extracted and smelted in Pearl until the beginning of the 20th Century.
When cheaper extraction and less expensive transportation dropped the value of copper ore in Pearl, the boom turned to bust. Today, you can see what is left of this thriving mining community with a few structures. You can still see the remains of the platted streets where homes were built. Today a few families still call the area home, with most residents summering in Pearl, working small ranches and enjoying the mountains and recreation of the northwestern end of North Park.
There is very little left of the town of Coalmont. A boom in finding a low-sulfur content form of bituminous coal opened up the Coalmont seam in the early 20th Century. The coal was mined from several open pit mines and shipped out on a spur of railroad through Hebron and Walden, CO. As with many boomtowns, the existence ofCoalmont relied on the demand for coal. Not only was cheaper coal being found in other parts of the US and other countries, but acoal seam fire greatly reduced the practicality of production.
Evidence of the coal seam fire can still be seen sometimes today as the fire continues to burn deep underground. Other than the old schoolhouse and the ruins of some of the structures of the mine, very little remains of this town that once loaded up thousands of tons of coal onto trains bound for other places.
The town of Hebron is little more than a cluster of buildings on the side of HWY 14 on the way to Steamboat. The old railroad grade used to run straight to Walden and Coalmont, with Hebron serving as a whistle stop along the way. The rails and ties are gone, but you can still see the old railroad grade as it runs through the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge and along HWY 125 to the Wyoming border where it meets up with theMedicine Bow Rail Trail—a great destination for mountain biking!
Gould POW Camp
Not only was North Park rich in minerals and fossil fuels, but it also had a thriving timber industry. The lodgepole pines of North Park were cut and hauled out of Jackson County to supply the railroads with timber for railroad ties, along with wood for new towns and cities cropping up throughout the West. Teams of “tie hacks” would cut and process the timber for railroad ties and later on during WWII, most men who were able-bodied enough to work in the woods had enlisted in the war to fight overseas.
To continue to supply the need for labor in the forests, German prisoners of war were shipped in by train to Walden and transported by truck to the POW camp in Gould, CO. The structures used were once aCivilian Conservation Corps camp, but offered additional use with prisoners doing pretty much the same jobs. The remote location and harsh terrain might have been familiar to some of the prisoners, but also served as a good way to keep them confined until the end of the war. Colorado was the destination for many POW camps during the Second World War, with many of the prisoners working in the fields and forests during wartime.
The Gould Community Center is one of the few remaining structures of this time, and some of the old timers of North Park can still tell you about watching the POWs come in on the trains. If you visit the Moose Visitor Center at the Colorado State Forest State Park, you can see evidence of German POWs on display. A can opener (found by me, Clinton Harris, in 1996) at the State Forest State Park bears the stamp of the German Army from WW2. You can see this spot on the Cache La Poudre North Park Scenic Byway in Gould.
Gold Mines
During the gold rush and beyond, North Park was thought to have been an ideal location for gold ore in northern Colorado. Unfortunately, no significant motherlodes were found and most sluicing and tunneling eventually dried up by the beginning of the 1900s. There are still plenty of locations where miners staked their claim, so be careful when exploring the mountains of North Park and for your own safety, never enter abandoned mine shafts.
So Many Stories Left to Tell
Many of these miners still live in Jackson County and could tell you about what life was like in those boomtown days where Walden and the other towns in Jackson County might have looked much different than today. For many, North Park might just be a place to stretch your legs on a scenic drive in the mountains, or to others a long-term stay on a hunting, fishing, or camping trip away from the noise and pollution of the city.
Over the years, this place has been many things to many people, but to truly appreciate it, one needs to dig just a little bit deeper and discover its many-storied past, and maybe even see a little bit of its future. From the fog of history, a ghost might emerge that has many stories to tell.