Ignited by embers from a coal-fueled passenger train on June 1, 2018, the 416 Fire burned 54,130 acres of the San Juan National Forest in southwest Colorado. By the time it was fully contained on July 31, it had become the sixth-largest wildfire in…

Alferd E. Packer (1842–1909), also “Alfred,” was a prospector who became famous after confessing to eating his dead comrades while trapped in the San Juan Mountains in February 1874. With the group starving and disoriented, it appears likely that Packer…

The Animas Canyon Toll Road was built in 1876–78 to connect the mining town of Silverton to the coal beds and agricultural produce of the Animas Valley near what is now Durango. The roughly thirty-mile wagon road operated for about five years before it…

Established in 1875 and occupied until the 1920s, Animas Forks is a ghost town northeast of Silverton in the San Juan Mountains. It sits at an elevation of about 11,200 feet. It survived primarily on the strength of speculative investment rather than…

When it opened in 1887, the Beaumont Hotel in Ouray was one of the finest hotels in the Rocky Mountains. After several successful decades, its fortunes declined along with Ouray’s mining economy, and it eventually closed in the 1960s. In 2005 the hotel…

The Brunot Agreement between the Nuche (Ute) and the US government in 1873 led to the development of mining in the San Juan Mountains by taking 3.7 million acres (about 5,780 square miles) from the Ute Reservation in western Colorado…

The Empire Chief Mine and Mill site is an abandoned nineteenth-century metal mining complex in Hinsdale County, located several miles west of Lake City on the southern slope of Sheep Mountain (83 Sunny Ave, Empire, CO 80438). The mine was established in…

The Hardrock Hundred Endurance Run is a famously difficult and beautiful 100-mile trail race held annually in the San Juan Mountains. First organized in 1992, soon after the Sunnyside Mine shut down, the event honors the region’s mining history and its…

Established in 1874, Hinsdale County is a mountainous, sparsely populated county of 1,123 square miles in southwest Colorado. The county was named for George A. Hinsdale, a prominent politician and newspaperman in nineteenth-century Colorado. The county…

La Plata County covers 1,700 square miles in southwest Colorado. It is named for the La Plata River and La Plata Mountains, both of which are named for the Spanish word for “silver.” La Plata County is bordered to the north by San Juan County, to the…

At an elevation of 8,661 feet in the heart of the San Juan Mountains, the historic mining town of Lake City is the only incorporated town in Hinsdale County. Named for nearby Lake San Cristobal, the town was founded in 1874 in a broad valley along the…

Lost Trail Ranch was established in 1877 as a way station and resupply spot along Stony Pass Road from the San Luis Valley to the mining camps of the San Juan Mountains. Located at an elevation of 9,800 feet along the Rio Grande, the way station served…

Otto Mears (1840–1931) was a Colorado businessman who played a key role in the removal of the Nuche (Ute) people and is best known for building more than 450 miles of toll roads and railroads on the Utes’ former lands in the southern and…

The town of Ouray was founded in 1875 along the Uncompahgre River near where it runs north out of the San Juan Mountains. Two years after the Nuche (Ute) people were dispossessed by the Brunot Agreement in 1873, prospectors found silver and later gold in…

Ouray County, named after nineteenth-century Ute leader Ouray, is a small county of 524 square miles in southwestern Colorado. It is bisected by the Uncompahgre River, which flows from Lake Como northeast of Silverton, through the county seat of Ouray,…

The Panic of 1893 touched off a nationwide economic depression that lasted for at least three years, threw millions out of work, and caused banks and businesses to fail across the country. In Colorado and other silver-mining states, the panic was tied to…

From the 1850s to the 1920s, gold and silver mining drove Colorado’s economy, making it into an urbanized, industrial state. The rapid development of Colorado’s mineral resources had political, social, and environmental consequences. The mining of gold…

Samuel Hitt Elbert (1833–99) was the sixth governor of the Colorado Territory (1873–74) and was elected as one of the first justices on the Colorado Supreme Court after statehood in 1876. The son-in-law of territorial governor and businessman John Evans,…

San Juan County was established just before Colorado became a state in 1876. It initially stretched from the Utah border in the west to its present border in the east. The next year, the first state assembly allocated most of San Juan County’s western…

The San Juan Mountains are the largest mountain range by area in the Centennial State, spanning thirteen counties in southwestern Colorado. In addition to being the home of the Ute Indians for hundreds of years, the mountains intrigued Spaniards, lured…

San Miguel County covers 1,289 square miles in southwest Colorado. Named for the river that flows northwest across its eastern flank, the county is bordered to the north by Montrose County, to the east by Ouray County, to the southeast by San Juan County…

Silverton is a historic mining town established in 1874 in Baker’s Park in the heart of the San Juan Mountains. After the Denver & Rio Grande Railway (now the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad) reached the town in 1882, the surrounding…

The West Fork Complex refers to three separate wildfires ignited by lightning strikes in southern Colorado’s San Juan Mountains in June 2013. The West Fork, Windy Pass, and Papoose Fires broke out between June 5 and June 19. By the time they were…