A Quest to Save Colorado’s Best Ghost Town
Twelve miles north of Silverton, Colorado, where the spruce and fir forests thin to alpine tundra, nine abandoned wooden structures rise out of a meadow. Over a century ago, several hundred people lived here at 11,000 feet, braving -30 temperatures, maddening winds, and, in one winter, 25 feet of snow. Animas Forks is one of Colorado’s best ghost towns, but in recent years, it was in danger of falling down.
Despite the hamlet’s remote location, some 250,000 people ride ATVs, trucks, and dirt bikes up the rugged mountain road every year to see it. Visitors love it, but some carve graffiti, tear off boards as souvenirs, and even pry nails out of the walls. Animas Forks needed help, fast. In Preservation, the magazine for the National Trust for Historical Preservation, I profile a hardy and remarkably devoted band of Silverton locals that have brought in some $12 million in grant funds for preservation work over the last few decades. Over the last two years, the group, centered around the all-volunteer San Juan Historical Society, helped stage a dramatic rescue of this beloved ghost town, which is now stabilized for the next few decades of visitors. Read my feature, “Ghost of a Chance,” in the spring issue of Preservation.