Altitude With Attitude in Colorado

A RUGGED mountain town perched at a lung-searing 10,152 feet — nearly two miles above sea level — Leadville is the highest incorporated city in the United States. Its main street is crammed with 1880s brick Victorians painted a kaleidoscope of colors: yellow, pink, purple and green. Even in summer, snowfields lace the soaring peaks that cradle the town.
Tourists and outdoorsy types are discovering the allure of this postcard of a town high in the Rockies. It’s 25 miles from the Interstate, it has only one stoplight, and the residents exchange phone numbers in four digits. Mountain bikers and horseback riders hit the trails; intrepid hikers scale Mounts Elbert and Massive, the two 14,000-foot peaks that dominate Leadville’s skyline; and anglers pull rainbows from high alpine lakes.
Gold was discovered in the town’s California Gulch in 1860, followed by silver in the late 1870s. But for Leadville, mining isn’t just the stuff of bygone reminiscences. Children in Lake County are routinely tested for blood-lead levels. (Sandboxes filled with mine tailings are not unheard of.) Until 1986, the Climax mine was running at full tilt, extracting molybdenum, a mouthful of a word that rolls easily off the tongues of locals. (It’s used as an agent for hardening steel.) With molybdenum prices spiking, the mine is expected to reopen in 2009.
On a weekend in June, Chris Albers, a green-eyed South Dakota farm boy, puttered around Cycles of Life, his new bike shop on Harrison Avenue, Leadville’s main drag. He also owns Provin’ Grounds, a hip coffee shop where locals sip lattes and peck on laptops. Mr. Albers first migrated to Vail in his 20s to snowboard. Before long, he was looking for a more authentic Western town, and he found it in Leadville.
While restoration is in the works for many of the century-old buildings in the 70-square-block historical district, the town’s back alleys and side streets are peppered with sagging outhouses, boarded-up barns and half-painted churches with broken stained glass windows. In a small grassy parcel downtown, rusting beer cans hang from wires, marked with a small wooden sign reading “Redneck Windchimes.”
“Leadville’s got character,” Mr. Albers said. “It’s not just another slick pop-up ski town. The old folks are miners, but there’s a new breed of people moving here.”
People like Dru Pashley, 28, a wiry runner who slings pizza dough at High Mountain Pies. As my husband, our three children and I waited for a takeout order, Mr. Pashley told us of his plans to run the Leadville 100. Every summer, ultramarathoners converge to run 100 miles of rocky trail in the thin air. (T-shirts for sale in Leadville riff on the milk campaign: “Got Oxygen?”)
We followed a walking tour map around Harrison Avenue, starting at the somewhat dilapidated Tabor Opera House, built in 1879 by Horace Tabor, a silver magnate. Inside, we climbed onto the stage, where Oscar Wilde once performed — and where live horses galloped on a treadmill during a production of “Ben-Hur.”
Tabor also left a legacy of salacious gossip. He deserted his austere first wife, Augusta, to marry Elizabeth McCourt Doe, a bodacious, round-eyed beauty nicknamed Baby Doe. They spent lavishly: a $90,000 diamond necklace; diamond-studded diaper pins; 100 peacocks to strut on their mansion grounds in Denver. When the price of silver crashed in 1893, they were left penniless, and after Tabor died, Baby Doe retreated to a cabin at the Matchless mine, where she lived as a recluse for 35 years.
Her power to intrigue appears timeless. When a tour guide at the Matchless told us that Baby Doe’s frozen body was discovered in the cabin during the brutal winter of 1935, my boys listened with eyes wide, mouths agape.
Another stop was Western Hardware, now an antiques store. Behind the counter is a wall of hundreds of tiny drawers, each with a different knob or hook. The row of copper nails used to measure lengths of rope is still visible in the wooden floorboards. The store is jam-packed with relics and replicas, including brothel tokens for $3 apiece.
If the year were 1879 and the tokens were real, they could have been cashed in at the tiny town of Twin Lakes, 20 miles south of Leadville. A onetime stop for stagecoaches and for miners heading over Independence Pass to Aspen, Twin Lakes is a ramshackle collection of dirt roads, sloping 1800s shacks and log cabins. Columbines grow among the weeds. We rented a boat from Johnny Gwaltney, a k a Johnny Canoe, who wore purple-tinted glasses and a giant silver belt buckle. “I’m a hikerneck,” he said. “It’s a cross between a hiker, a biker and a redneck.” (He traded his Harley for canoes five years ago.)
We paddled half an hour across Twin Lakes to the abandoned Interlaken resort, where Denver’s upper crust vacationed in the 1880s. They arrived by train; today the ghost resort is accessible only by a 45-minute hike or by boat. Of the handful of buildings, including a hexagonal six-stall privy that once featured leather seats, only Dexter Cabin has been restored. Inside, visitors can explore rooms decorated in eight different imported woods and climb a steep ladder to a cupola overlooking the lake.
Back in Leadville, at the 1878 Silver Dollar Saloon, Paul Smith, a 42-year-old transplant from Kansas, told us how he fell in love with the mountains after being stationed in Italy in the army. “I’ve got Elbert and Massive right out my window,” he said. “I’m in heaven here.” But to stay there, he drives 45 minutes to heating-and-cooling-system jobs in Vail. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “I bring a pot of coffee and listen to N.P.R.”
It’s not an unusual commute in Leadville, which remains a hardscrabble frontier outpost where fourth-generation families scratch out a living. In 1983, California Gulch was designated a Superfund site. In 1986, when the Climax mine closed, 3,000 workers were laid off. Earlier this year, a temporary state of emergency was declared when a billion gallons of toxic water backed up in the mines.
In the face of it all, Leadville has persevered by retooling itself as a tourist destination. One major drawing card: the National Mining Hall of Fame & Museum. Visitors can marvel at the museum’s model of the ice castle Leadville constructed out of 5,000 tons of ice in 1896. For rockhounds, there’s a 2,155-pound hunk of galena, icelike logs of selenite, chunks of polished malachite. Here I learned that the sparkle in my eye shadow comes from mica, and the dust on my chewing gum is limestone.
BUT really, the best way to appreciate Leadville’s mining pedigree is to leave the museum and explore the mining district firsthand. We started with a walk on the 11.6-mile Mineral Belt Trail, a paved path that circumnavigates Leadville and its adjacent mining district. Bikers and skateboarders passed us as we ambled through Stray Horse Gulch, an area dotted with rusting ore carts, wooden shacks and head frames. The kids stopped to toss rocks into a tailings pond filled with water the color of boiled beets. A superfluous sign warned, “No Swimming.”
Later we rumbled on a scenic passenger train along the old South Park rails, where freight cars once hauled ore from the Climax mine. The next morning, we took a ghost-town driving tour and were captivated by the skeletons of century-old ore houses, hoists and mine tunnels. Less enchanting were the mountains of tailings, waste rock and black slag.
It’s possible, though, to transcend it all from the Venir mine shaft, the tour’s high point at 11,550 feet. We climbed past slumping mine structures of timber and corrugated tin, up mounds of tailings that looked like a strange lumpy beach, and soaked in a 360-degree panorama of jagged peaks. Before long, the kids found chips of mica glittering in the tailings. They used their fingernails to dig them out. “We’re rich!” they shouted. We may not have hit pay dirt in Leadville, but we did drive away in a minivan covered in dust.