Fremont Pass

The summit this bronze describes is now the Climax mine. Molybdenum worked here from 1916 made it the richest mine and mill in the state, for decades supplying more than half the world's supply, much of it for wartime steel. Its company town, Climax, kept the country's highest post office until 1974, though its houses had been hauled down to Leadville in the 1960s; tailings ponds now cover the old camp of Kokomo to the north. The mine sat idle for years before reopening in 2012.

What the plaque says

This memorial is the property of the State of Colorado Fremont Pass On Continental Divide between Arkansas and Blue River drainages Altitude 11,316 feet Western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Named in honor of John C. Fremont, famous western explorer Erected by the State Historical Society of Colorado from the Mrs. J. N. Hall Foundation and by the Mount Massive Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, of Leadville 1930

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• South Park City Museum — 14 mi
  A mining town assembled in the 1950s from buildings hauled out of South Park's dying camps, by a Colorado Springs lawyer who wanted no imitation town.
• Independence Pass — 27 mi
  Crossed by prospectors on the Fourth of July 1879, opened as a toll road for the Aspen rush in 1881, and shut by snow half of every year since.

More markers nearby

• Tennessee Pass — 6.5 mi
• Hoosier Pass — 6.7 mi
• Healy House — 9.8 mi
• Fairplay — 14 mi