Creede, Colorado

Creede sits at nearly 8,800 feet at the head of the Rio Grande valley, tucked into a narrow slot where Willow Creek cuts down through the volcanic cliffs of the San Juan Mountains. The valley had Ute travel routes and early ranchers — Kit Carson's brother-in-law Tom Boggs farmed at nearby Wagon Wheel Gap around 1840, and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad reached the area's hot springs in 1883. Then, around 1890, prospector Nicholas C. Creede struck a rich silver vein on Willow Creek at his Holy Moses Mine, and the quiet valley exploded. Creede became the last of Colorado's great silver boomtowns, and it boomed hard: a settlement of a few hundred people swelled toward ten thousand in barely two years, spilling into a string of overnight camps with names like Jimtown, North Creede, and Bachelor as mines like the Amethyst and Commodore poured out silver.

The boom pulled in the whole Wild West at once. Bob Ford, the man who had shot Jesse James, ran a saloon in the young camp until he himself was shot dead there in June 1892 by Edward O'Kelley. Con man Soapy Smith worked the crowds, and newspaperman Cy Warman, who edited the Creede Chronicle, gave the camp its immortal line, writing that in the electric-lit, around-the-clock town "it's day all day in the day-time, and there is no night in Creede." Fire and flood tore through the young town in 1892, and Creede incorporated that same June. In 1893 it won the county seat of the brand-new Mineral County — the story goes that residents fetched the official records by wagon under cover of night. When the Silver Panic of 1893 crushed silver prices, most Colorado camps died; Creede hung on by mining lead and zinc alongside the silver.

That stubbornness earned Creede its nickname, "the camp that would not die." Hard-rock mining ran here for nearly a century, until the last operation closed in 1985. What kept the town alive after the ore ran out started in 1966, when the local Jaycees mailed letters to universities and a group of University of Kansas theater students drove out to put on a summer season. That became the Creede Repertory Theatre, now a nationally recognized professional company — it won a National Theatre Conference award in 2007 — and one of the town's largest summer employers. The other landmark tells the mining story literally: the Underground Mining Museum, whose construction began in 1990, is a warren of tunnels and displays that local miners blasted straight into the cliff face at the north edge of town. Today Creede is the only incorporated town in Mineral County and its county seat, a small year-round community wrapped in national forest.

Creede today is a genuine one-of-a-kind: a tiny former mining town of a few hundred year-round residents at the dead end of a highway, where Main Street runs right up into the walls of a box canyon and the pavement finally gives out at the old mine workings. Summers are the heart of it — the Creede Repertory Theatre packs the historic downtown with professional shows, the Underground Mining Museum takes you into tunnels carved out of the cliff, and galleries and cafes fill the brick storefronts. Just past town, the Bachelor Loop backcountry drive climbs past headframes and ghost-camp ruins, the Rio Grande runs cold and famous for trout, and the surrounding Rio Grande National Forest opens onto the Weminuche Wilderness and the strange stone spires of the Wheeler Geologic Area. The night skies are dark enough that stargazing is its own reason to visit. It feels remote, artsy, and deeply Colorado all at once.