Hoosier Pass

The Frémont of the bronze's 1844 was on his way home from California. With Kit Carson and Thomas Fitzpatrick guiding, his party came into Middle Park by Muddy Pass and left it by the Blue River, the route the bronze carries over this gap into South Park, then went down the Arkansas to reach Bent's Fort on July 1. Charles Preuss's map from the journey was the first to set the mountain parks down accurately. The Indiana men who named the pass came sixteen years later.

What the plaque says

This memorial is the property of the State of Colorado Hoosier Pass Across Continental Divide between South Park and the Blue River Altitude 11,542 feet Crossed by Fremont 1844 Named for Hoosier Gulch, discovered and worked as a placer camp by Indiana men 1860 Erected by the State Historical Society of Colorado from the Mrs. J. N. Hall Foundation and by the State Highway Department and the U.S. Forest Service 1929

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• South Park City Museum — 9.9 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.
• Mount Blue Sky — 27 mi
  Rosalie for a painter, Evans for a governor, and since 2023 a name the Cheyenne and Arapaho asked for, at the top of North America's highest paved road.
• Georgetown Loop Railroad — 30 mi
  Scrapped in 1939 for $450, rebuilt a century after it first opened, and running again over the bridge that crosses its own track.
• Hotel de Paris — 31 mi
  A French cook's hotel in a silver town, kept for twenty-five years by a man whose name turned out not to be his own.

More markers nearby

• Fremont Pass — 6.7 mi
• Fairplay — 10 mi
• Tarryall Diggings — 11 mi
• Tennessee Pass — 13 mi