Red Mountain Mining District

North of Red Mountain Pass, US 550 drops past three peaks named Red Mountain, their slopes stained orange, red and yellow by oxidized iron in rock altered long ago by hot mineral water. In 1882 the prospector John Robinson found a huge pipe of silver ore below them and staked the Yankee Girl claim; its shaft went nearly straight down about 1,200 feet, and for a time it ranked among the richest mines in the country. Its wooden headframe still stands beside the highway, the most photographed relic in the district.

Six camps crowded into less than eight square miles: Red Mountain Town, Ironton, Guston and others. In March 1883 the Ouray newspaper the Solid Muldoon reported that the site of Red Mountain Town had been spruce forest five weeks before and now had hotels, a printing office, stores, a telephone office, saloons and dance halls. The first train of the Silverton Railroad reached the town on September 17, 1888. The silver crash of 1893 broke the district, the Yankee Girl closed in 1898, and by 1913 Red Mountain Town had lost its post office.

The Idarado company worked the district's gold, lead and zinc into the twentieth century through a tunnel more than five miles long to Telluride, and its trestle and buildings stand at the overlook. In the late 1990s and 2000s, when the mining companies were selling and the land might have been subdivided, a local task force worked with the Trust for Public Land and the Forest Service to bring much of it into public hands. Ironton's cabins stand in a meadow a few miles north. Why the road is called the Million Dollar Highway, nobody can now say for certain.