Crested Butte, Colorado

Crested Butte began in the late 1870s as a supply camp for the silver and gold prospectors working the surrounding Elk and West Elk Mountains, and the town was incorporated on July 15, 1880. But it was coal, not precious metal, that gave the place staying power. The valley held both bituminous and anthracite coal, and once the silver played out in the early 1880s, mining companies and their coke ovens turned the area into the state's leading mountain coal operation. That boom carried a hard price: on January 24, 1884, the methane-filled Jokerville Mine just outside town exploded, killing about fifty-nine miners in one of Colorado's deadliest coal disasters. Mining went on regardless, and the coal camp identity held for decades.

The mine that defined the town's second act was Colorado Fuel and Iron's Big Mine, which ran from 1894 until it closed in 1952, ending Crested Butte's long run as one of Colorado's most enduring communities of coal miners. What kept the town from becoming a ghost was a new use for its steep, snowy peak. A ski area opened on Mt. Crested Butte in the early 1960s, and in January 1963 the resort built a top-to-bottom gondola — one of Colorado's earliest. Then, in September 1976, a group of locals rode heavy one-speed 'klunker' bikes over 12,700-foot Pearl Pass to Aspen, half in revenge against motorcyclists who'd bragged about the route. That ride became the annual Pearl Pass Tour and helped make Crested Butte one of the cradles of American mountain biking.

Crested Butte protected its past even as it reinvented itself. In 1974 a cluster of downtown buildings was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and the district was later expanded to cover hundreds of structures along and around Elk Avenue — most dating from the late-19th and early-20th-century mining years — giving the town one of Colorado's best-preserved false-front streetscapes. In 1990 the state legislature made it official the other way too, naming Crested Butte the Wildflower Capital of Colorado, a nod to the dense summer blooms the high, wet valley produces. Today the old coal town sits at roughly 8,900 feet as a year-round mountain community: a ski resort just up the road at Mt. Crested Butte, world-class singletrack out every direction, and a colorful Victorian main street that never got paved over.

Crested Butte today feels like a small, close-knit mountain town that never traded away its character. Elk Avenue is the heart of it — a row of brightly painted false-front buildings from the coal-and-silver days, now filled with coffee shops, bike shops, bookstores, and restaurants, with wildflowers and the ring of peaks framing the whole thing. Winters belong to the ski resort a few miles up at Mt. Crested Butte, known for its steep terrain, but a lot of locals will tell you summer is the secret season: the valley erupts into some of the densest wildflower displays in the Rockies, and legendary singletrack like the trails around town and the famous Pearl Pass route draw riders from everywhere. It's the kind of place where you can ride or ski in the morning, wander the historic streets in the afternoon, and catch the alpenglow on the butte that gave the town its name.