Jeep Adventure

We had to get up and leave pretty quick this morning as we had to go back to BV Jeeps by 8am for our 9am Jeep Wrangler rental. We had rented the Jeep for the whole day this time, 9-5. After renting the side by side from them, we knew to procedure when we got there and got through it quick enough to be on the road by 8:45.

The area we would be off-roading was the mountains around the ghost towns of St Elmo and Tin Cup. It was a popular spot since it was Saturday, it was nice out, and the leaves were starting to change. There were definitely a lot of cars that I would say should not have been on an off road trail, but they seemed to make it. We saw numerous non trail ready vehicles off road throughout Colorado. I don’t know if they don’t know any better, or they just don’t care about their vehicles. There were also many hardcore trail machines and side by sides. Side by sides are huge in Colorado, on the highways it seems like every other pickup truck is towing one.

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So we started off heading to the actual ghost town of St Elmo, which is pretty much a tourist trap at this point. St Elmo is still technically a ghost town, although the general store is still open, and recently people have actually started buying the old houses off the main street or just building new houses close to town. It’s cool to see the old nonresidential buildings that are still lining main street, but again, it’s become a big tourist spot.

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Is there a face in that window?

Is there a face in that window?

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As we wondered around town, we noticed that all the side by sides were heading north to Tin Cup pass. We had heard that Tin Cup pass had become pretty rough and vehicle damage was likely, so between not wanting to destroy the rental and the fact that the more capable machines were flocking that way, we decided to head south to Hancock pass and the ghost town of Hancock, and there was a lake at the end of the trail to turn around at.

The trails in Colorado were all hard-packed dirt with rocks of various sizes everywhere. The rocks got bigger and more numerous as were traveled away from St Elmo. At first the rocks are easily avoidable, not so much toward the end. There were a few spots to stop on the way to the lake, the first of which was an old log mill that was slowly being restored. We had to park and walk across an old railroad bridge over a nice waterfall to get to the spot to see it.

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Back onto the main trail for a couple miles until we got to the Alpine Tunnel Trailhead. From here there were hiking and off road trails to go off on. We were here to drive it, but our map wasn’t the most comprehensive, so we first tried to drive up the hiking trail, which we didn’t get far. Next we accidentally started up the Hancock Pass trail, which was an advanced/expert jeep trail. This trail, right from the start, had become all rock, no dirt. We didn’t get very far before there was a whole line of purpose-built 4x4s behind us. We pulled over to let them pass and asked a nice guy in a Jeep if we were on the right trail. He told us no, and that Hancock Pass went straight up and over the mountain. Nope. And after taking the last couple wrong turns, we figured we’d find a spot to take a break and eat lunch before continuing on.

After eating our PB&J’s we continued on. By process of elimination, we started to follow the last trail that we hadn’t tried yet. This trail was pretty much right in the middle of the trail we had been on so far and Hancock Pass. It became harder to avoid large rocks so we had to start finding the right line, which jostled us greatly, and out here you don’t want to break anything,

We got off track a few times as we climbed, there were more side trails than there were on the map, so of course we took harder trails when given the chance, only to turn around. Eventually we came to an even steeper climb than we had been doing and saw a pretty high clearance pickup backing down the hill since he couldn’t make it. If he was having second thoughts, we figured our best move was to turn back as well.

It was then that for some reason I really wanted to get to the end of the trail and the lake. The trail to the lake wasn’t supposed to require that high of clearance, so I thought that we were on the wrong trail again and that I should find the right one and continue. There was no obvious other trail, and it was getting rough and late, so Kacie finally convinced me that we didn’t have to get to the lake and to head back, which was for the best.

On the way back to St Elmo, we stopped to check out some sort of building that had slid down the hill and was tilting towards the trail.

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We also stopped to see the ghost town of Hancock. You could see some kind of foundation from the trail, but I did think there would be something else. Nope, the only thing left was a couple of logs that the sign said was the foundation of the saloon in Hancock. The town at one point actually had buildings all over the hillside, but there is no trace of anything else now.

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Once we got back down to St Elmo, we decided to go into the general store as it wasn’t open when we first explored the town. Kacie bought an aspen leaf necklace and I got a shirt. At this point outside, the tourist action was much worse. The old man in the store said that he thought this weekend was more crowded than a holiday weekend, due to the leaves changing and the nice weather. The worst part was that the thing that seemed to amuse these people the most, was that they could all sit around the other side of the street and feed chipmunks… so many people sitting on the ground feeding chipmunks it was weird.

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At this point it was getting toward the end of the afternoon, so we headed back to BV Jeeps to return the Jeep. Since it didn’t get dark until around 7:30, we should have enough time to hop back into our truck and check out another ghost town, Vicksburg. It was on the way from Buena Vista to Leadville and only about 8 miles from the highway.

Those 8 miles turned quickly into a trail much like what we had just done in the Jeep, only now we were in the Ram. We made it to Vicksburg, but we also really shook the truck and ourselves again. This was also another road where a lot of cars you wouldn’t think should be there, flying down the road, like one wrong turn wouldn’t shoot you 100 feet off into a tree.

Vicksburg is another abandoned town where people are starting to buy the old houses as hunting cabins. It hasn’t totally caught on there yet, so there were only a couple old houses that looked as if someone lived there sometimes. There was an old Jeep sitting down the road with an newer Ram at one of these lived in houses, which were the only vehicles we saw there.

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On the non-residential side of the town, most of the buildings are still there, upright at least. You can’t go in any of them, but you can wander all around the outside, and peek into the windows that you can kind of see through.

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We explored the town a bit and then headed back down to the highway. We also wanted to find a ghost town called Climax, which wasn’t supposed to be too far away, but the GPS sent us up a mountain to the current operational Climax mine. Not what we were looking for. We tried again with good old Google and ended up on the main highway at an abandoned motel.

Now, after looking it up again, it turns out the there are no structures left of the town because the mine resumed operations, which is what we saw, and the town’s buildings were moved to Leadville. So not only did we actually see the site of the town of Climax, even though it’s a large modern mine now, we also probably saw at least a few of the old buildings from the town of Climax since we stayed in Leadville for a couple days and saw many older looking buildings. No telling at this point which ones might or might not have been Climax buildings.

At this point we were getting hungry and bailed on finding any more ghost towns. We found a place in town with an online menu we could order from… a lot of the places up here don’t have websites or any kind of online menu, first world problems.

We picked up our food and went back to the house to eat and start packing the truck up for the trip back to Denver. The next day we would go to Denver airport to switch rental vehicles and start the road-trip back home,

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North Rim & Leadville