In 1866 the rancher and businessman Charles Hall added a kettle house and barn to his Colorado Salt Works in South Park. The only salt works and the second manufacturing facility built in Colorado, the buildings operated intermittently for several years…

Fairplay is one of Colorado’s oldest mining and ranching towns. Situated in South Park in the mountains of central Colorado, it was part of the homelands of the Nuche or Ute people when US settlement began in 1859 during the Colorado Gold Rush. Gold…

Begun on June 8, 2002, after a US Forest Service employee started a fire at a campsite, the Hayman Fire is the fourth-largest wildfire in Colorado history. Across a wide swath of foothills between South Park and Colorado Springs, the fire burned nearly…

Park County covers 2,211 square miles of the Rocky Mountains in central Colorado. Park County’s elevation rages from 7,000 to 14,000 feet. The county’s namesake and dominant geographic feature is South Park, a large, high-altitude basin containing the…

Trout Creek Ranch has its origin in lands consolidated by English investors Edward Arthur and David Chalmers along Trout Creek in the 1870s. The ranch, which stretches for about four miles in the valley between Red Hill and Reinecker Ridge southeast of…

Wetlands are ecosystems that are at least periodically saturated or inundated by water, creating unique habitats that support a wide variety of plant and animal species. Colorado wetlands include a diverse range of ecosystem types, each with distinctive…