Animas Forks

Prospectors settled at the junction of the three forks of the Animas River in 1873, eleven thousand feet up and twelve miles above Silverton, and called the camp Three Forks of the Animas. By 1876 it was a town, incorporated in 1881 as Animas Forks, and by 1883 it held about 450 people, with a general store, a newspaper, a post office, saloons and two assay offices serving the silver and gold mines on the slopes above.

Winters at that height buried the town, and in the early years most people went down to Silverton when the snow came. William Duncan, a miner who also carried the mail, was among the first to stay through the year, and the two-story house he built in 1879, with a bay window looking up the valley, is the best-kept building left; the miner Tom Walsh later owned it. A big mill went up in the early twentieth century as the camp revived briefly, and when the ore ran out people drifted away, and by the 1920s it was empty.

The Bureau of Land Management owns the site and has stabilized the buildings since the 1970s, with major repairs in the late 1990s, working with the San Juan County Historical Society in Silverton, whose volunteers have kept the town from falling down. It sits on the Alpine Loop Backcountry Byway, about twelve miles from Silverton by a county road that is passable for ordinary cars only part of the way; a high-clearance or four-wheel-drive vehicle is the safe choice, and the passes beyond Animas Forks require one.