Leadville, Colorado

Leadville began with a disappointment. Prospectors chasing the Colorado Gold Rush worked California Gulch beginning around 1860, but the placer gold played out fast, choked by a heavy sand nobody could sell. That sand turned out to be cerussite — lead carbonate rich in silver — and its recognition around 1874 set off one of the richest silver rushes in the world. In 1877 mine owner Horace Tabor and smelter man August Meyer helped establish the town, and within a few years tens of thousands of people had poured into the Upper Arkansas Valley. Silver here launched some of the most famous fortunes in American history: Horace Tabor rose from a general store to become a U.S. senator, Meyer Guggenheim got his start in Leadville mining and smelting, and Margaret Tobin — later Molly Brown of Titanic fame — married J.J. Brown here in 1886, the couple's fortune arriving with a Leadville-area gold strike.

The boom didn't last unbroken. In 1893 the federal repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act collapsed silver prices and gutted Leadville's economy — Horace Tabor himself lost his fortune. But the mountains around Cloud City held more than silver. Miners pivoted to gold, lead, zinc, and copper, and in the 20th century the story moved uphill to Fremont Pass, where the Climax mine became one of the world's largest producers of molybdenum — a metal that hardens steel. Climax grew its own company town on the pass, which was moved down to Leadville in the early 1960s to clear ground for more mining. After long dormancy, Climax resumed molybdenum production in 2012, and mining, in some form, has never fully left.

What the booms left behind is remarkably intact. Leadville's downtown — some 70 square blocks of Victorian storefronts, churches, and the Tabor Opera House, most built between roughly 1880 and 1905, alongside an adjacent 20-square-mile preserved mining district — was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. You can still visit the 1884 Temple Israel, built on land donated by Tabor and the second synagogue built in Colorado, and ride the Leadville, Colorado & Southern Railroad up toward the Continental Divide. Today Leadville is a working, lived-in town of a few thousand people, its mining past preserved not as a stage set but as the actual place people call home.

Life in Leadville is life at the top — the highest incorporated city in the country, ringed by Colorado's two tallest peaks, 14,440-foot Mount Elbert to the southwest and 14,429-foot Mount Massive to the northwest. It's a genuine mountain town, not a resort facsimile: Harrison Avenue's brick Victorian storefronts hold cafes, gear shops, and museums, and the whole place has an unpolished, high-country authenticity people love. The outdoors is the daily draw. Turquoise Lake and Twin Lakes offer paddling, fishing, and lakeside trails; the 11.6-mile Mineral Belt Trail loops the old mining district on a paved path good for biking, running, and winter Nordic skiing; and the surrounding San Isabel National Forest opens straight onto fourteeners and backcountry. Leadville is also famous for its endurance events, from the storied Leadville Trail 100 ultramarathon and mountain-bike race to winter ski-joring down the main street — a town that wears its grit proudly.