Telluride, Colorado

Telluride sits in a box canyon at about 8,750 feet, walled on three sides by the peaks of the western San Juan Mountains, with the San Miguel River running out the open end. Prospectors began working the surrounding basins in the mid-1870s, and a camp took shape in 1878 under the name Columbia. There was already a Columbia in California, so when the post office opened on July 26, 1880, it took the name Telluride instead — a nod to the tellurium-bearing ores that carry gold and silver. The town was incorporated in 1887 and formally became Telluride that same year. Silver drove the first boom, but gold, zinc, copper, and lead all came out of the peaks above town, and by the 1890s Telluride was a hard-working, hard-living mining town at the end of a long, high wagon road into the mountains.

Two outsized stories came out of that boom. On June 24, 1889, a young Robert LeRoy Parker — soon known to the world as Butch Cassidy — and his accomplices walked into the San Miguel Valley Bank on Colorado Avenue and rode off with roughly $21,000; it was the first bank robbery of his career. Two years later, engineer Lucien L. Nunn needed cheap power for the stamp mill at his Gold King Mine and gambled on a brand-new technology. Working with George Westinghouse and using a motor built on Nikola Tesla's patents, Nunn built the Ames hydroelectric plant on the San Miguel, which went online on June 19, 1891 as one of the first systems anywhere to transmit alternating current over distance for industrial use — a direct forerunner of the AC power that would later light Niagara Falls.

When Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893, silver prices collapsed and Telluride's mines began a long decline that stretched, on and off, into the 1970s. What saved the town was its snow and its bones: because it had emptied out rather than being torn down, its Victorian main street survived largely intact, and in 1961 the town core was designated a National Historic Landmark District for its place in the story of Western mining. In 1972, Chicago businessman Joseph Zoline opened the Telluride ski area on the slopes above town, and the old camp reinvented itself as a resort. In 1996 a free gondola linked Telluride to the newer town of Mountain Village next door — still the only free public gondola of its kind in the country.

Telluride today is a tiny grid of a town — only about eight by twelve blocks — dropped into one of the most dramatic settings in Colorado, so the mountains are quite literally at the end of every street. The historic main street, Colorado Avenue, still has its Victorian storefronts, now full of coffee shops, bookstores, galleries, and restaurants, and you can ride the free gondola up over the ridge to Mountain Village and back just for the view. In winter the skiing drops right toward town; in summer the box canyon turns green and the calendar fills with festivals, from bluegrass to film. At the closed end of the canyon, Bridal Veil Falls plunges 365 feet — the tallest free-falling waterfall in Colorado — with a restored 1907 power plant perched at its lip. It is a walkable, close-knit place where a world-class resort and a genuine old mining town share the same few blocks.