Topic
History and culture
Mining towns and railroads, landmarks and museums, festivals, food, and the local-color stories that make each corner of Colorado make sense.
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Local notes
More history and culture notes
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History and culture
Most of Silverton sits inside a National Historic Landmark district
Much of the town of Silverton is a National Historic Landmark district recognized for its mining-era buildings, which is worth knowing if you own or change a property there.
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Northwest Colorado was Ute homeland, and that history deserves care
The land that became Moffat County was long the homeland of Ute people, and their removal in the late 1800s opened it to settlement — a history worth learning from official and tribal sources.
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Old Threshers Day in Yuma: a harvest run on steam
Each year the weekend following Labor Day, Yuma fires up antique steam engines and threshing machines and works real wheat the old way, twice a day.
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Ouray's Main Street is a listed historic district
Much of downtown Ouray is the Ouray Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with late-1800s buildings like the county courthouse and Wright's Opera House.
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Pagosa's old waterworks is now its history museum
The San Juan Historical Museum in Pagosa Springs sits in the town's former waterworks building and keeps Archuleta County's local history.
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Ride a mine train deep into Galena Mountain at the Old Hundred
Up Cunningham Gulch east of Silverton, the Old Hundred Gold Mine Tour rides a vintage electric mine train a third of a mile into Galena Mountain, with former miners running the old machines and free gold panning afterward.
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Riding the High Line Out of Leadville
A seasonal scenic train climbs an old mining grade out of Leadville for big views of Colorado's two tallest peaks.
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Steamboat's Summer Rodeo: The Cowboy Half of Ski Town USA
On summer Friday and Saturday nights, Steamboat trades skis for spurs at a downtown arena whose rodeo roots run back to 1898.
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Sugar City's old factory gates mark a vanished boomtown
The brick-and-wrought-iron entrance gates in Sugar City are the last surviving piece of the beet sugar factory that gave the town its name and its early identity.
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Taste of Creede: a painter's festival that turned a mountain town into an arts hub
A festival started by a watercolorist more than 35 years ago fills Creede's Main Street with working artists, a Silver Chef cook-off, and a one-hour Quick Draw each Memorial Day weekend.
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The Alpine Tunnel: a narrow-gauge railroad under the Divide
The Alpine Tunnel Historic District preserves the railbed and stone tunnel where a narrow-gauge line once crossed the Continental Divide into Gunnison County.
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The free Golden museum with a moon rock and a room of glowing stone
On the Colorado School of Mines campus, a free earth-science museum holds an Apollo 17 moon rock, a cave of glowing minerals, and tens of thousands of specimens that explain why Golden became a mining town.
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The German colony that came before the mines
Before the silver rush, a colony of German immigrants from Chicago tried to farm the Wet Mountain Valley in 1870, and the congregation they founded lives on at Hope Lutheran Church in Westcliffe.
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The Julesburg Drag Strip Still Races on an Old Airport Runway
On a stretch of the old Julesburg Municipal Airport runway, a quarter-mile drag strip has been running cars since the late 1950s and still races under NHRA sanction.
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The Lincoln County Free Fair & Rodeo in Hugo
Late each summer, the county's ranching and 4-H families gather at the Hugo fairgrounds for livestock shows, exhibits, a parade, and a rodeo.
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The Matchless Mine and the cabin where Baby Doe Tabor held on
A short drive up from downtown Leadville, a guided surface tour of Horace Tabor's silver mine ends at the spare cabin where his widow lived out her last decades.
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The Riverwalk put the Arkansas River back in downtown Pueblo
The Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo is a downtown waterway built where the river was diverted after the 1921 flood, run by a public authority and free to walk year-round.
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The South Platte River Trail byway loops through Sedgwick County's frontier past
A short state-designated scenic and historic byway near Julesburg follows the old westward route past Fort Sedgwick and a Pony Express station site.
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The TANK: a Rangely water tank that sings
An old steel water tank outside Rangely became a sound chamber so unusual that musicians fly in to record inside it.
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The Tumbleweed Fair & Rodeo is Cheyenne County's big week each July
Each July the Cheyenne County Tumbleweed Fair & Rodeo fills the Cheyenne Wells fairgrounds with rodeo, 4-H and FFA shows, a carnival, and the county's whole community.
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Under a Wray Cornfield, an Ice Age Bison Hunt
A rancher's bones turned out to be one of the oldest bison hunts in Colorado, and the Wray Museum is where you can stand close to it.
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Victor: the gold district's quieter, lived-in twin
A few miles from Cripple Creek, Victor is a walkable 1890s gold-boom town where brick streets, Lowell Thomas's hometown museum, and an overlook onto old and modern mining still tell the story.
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Walden's Never Summer Rodeo: North Park's Biggest Weekend
Each June, Walden hosts a pro rodeo that has run for more than 80 years and pulls the whole valley into one long ranching celebration.
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Why Gunnison Feels Like a College Town
Western Colorado University, the first college on the Western Slope, has shaped the rhythm and character of Gunnison since its first class of 13 students in 1911.
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