The Central Rockies

South Park was Nuuchiu hunting country long before fur trappers named it the Bayou Salado, and the Arkansas River rises a few miles from Leadville, the highest incorporated city in the country. There, in 1877 and 1878, the heavy black sand that had clogged gold miners' sluices turned out to be lead carbonate rich in silver. Horace Tabor, a storekeeper who grubstaked two prospectors for a share of whatever they found, became one of the richest men in the West, left his wife Augusta for Elizabeth McCourt, known as Baby Doe, and lost everything when silver collapsed in 1893. Baby Doe held on to the Matchless Mine for more than thirty years after his death and was found frozen in her cabin beside it in March 1935.

In April 1942 the Army began building Camp Hale in the Pando Valley north of Leadville to train soldiers who would fight on skis, and the men who trained there called it Camp Hell. The 10th Mountain Division went to Italy and broke through the German line in the Apennines in early 1945, and its veterans came home to found or run more than sixty ski areas, Vail among them, twenty miles from the old barracks. After the war the CIA trained Tibetan resistance fighters in the same valley in secret. Camp Hale and the Tenmile Range became a national monument on October 12, 2022.

Aspen, another silver camp the crash of 1893 emptied, was half asleep until Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke of Chicago arrived after the war and built a ski company, a music festival and an institute on the bones of the mining town.

What to See in The Central Rockies

3 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Maroon Bells

Aspen

Two fourteeners of crumbling red mudstone, called the Deadly Bells since eight people died on them in 1965, and reachable in summer only by reservation.

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Historic Sites

Independence Pass

Aspen

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.

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South Park City Museum

Fairplay

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.

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Scenic Drives through The Central Rockies

Stories from The Central Rockies

The Central Rockies rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.