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Thursday, June 11, 2015

Left Denver, arrived in Creede, Colorado

Since we have two grown children and their families in Denver, we stopped there and spent some time doing family oriented things.  so, back to the adventures.

We looked on the internet for places to park our RV near Denver and were sorely dssappointed.  What we find is that many RV parks do not have any internet presence and so cannot be found that way.  We called around off and on the several days, trying to plan our next move, and to plan for where to spend the 4th of July, the biggest summer vacation time of the year.  We were in for trouble.  There was nothing available anywhere near Denver and so by default, we arrived in Creede, Colorado.

What a happy surprise.  Creed is a little mining town southwest of Colorado Springs, up high (8800 feet) in the Rockies.  Man, it is beautiful!
A street corner in Creede


Lance always beats me to the punch in his emails, so I will attach an excerpt from him describing Creede, and I think you will get the idea clearly from him.
Mountain Views near Creede

Creede, CO is the county seat of Mineral County, and the only town of any size, with about 500 residents in the immediate vicinity.  There are 290 residents in the city proper.  It does not even have a county library, but it does have one of the highest rated repertory theaters in America!  People come from far and wide to attend the theater in Creede.  '

Creede also had, and still has, the richest vein of silver ever mined on earth.  There is a vein of silver here that is 30 feet wide and 10 miles long, that is currently not being mined because of the low price of silver.  The first five miles were mined between 1885 and 1985.  When the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market in silver it caused the market to collapse.  I talked at some length to a miner, or rather former miner, today nicknamed 'Brownie', a man of about 75 today, and he told me all about the silver vein as it is currently.  He said that he mined for 26 years, until Bunkie Hunt ruined the market, and he said that the silver assayed out at about 1,000 ounces of silver per ton!  Anna atsa' lotta silver, as the Italian man said.  The town at the north end funnels down between to 600' high precipices, and the road goes almost straight up.  This is where there commences at least 8 or 9 different mines, but can you imagine 10 more miles of silver in a vein 30 feet wide??  You are talking tens of millions of ounces of silver.  Brownie said, 'this whole mountain is basically loaded with silver'.

There is a loop you can drive, called 'Bachelor's loop', named for a ghost town above us here at about 10,500 feet.  Bachelor was the first town here, but it soon was determined that the current location of Creede was a better place for a town.  Anyway, the Bachelor's loop road goes about straight up, about one mile outside of town and a little stream flies down the canyon next to the dirt road.  So precipice, stream, nearly vertical road--about a 12% grade I would guess with loose gravel and dirt. We went to drive it yesterday in our Ford F-250 and right at the top the road takes an acute turn to the right, to continue up to the top of the mountain.  I made a little run at it twice, eased the gas in  second gear, and the truck simply did not have the traction!  It was like trying to climb a 12-13% grade, on steel ball-bearings with dirt all over them.  Just before the acute turn the truck would just start throwing gravel in all directions, lurch, and begin to slide sideways as it skated on those 'ballbearings'.
View from the road, near Creede
 

It was unnerving to say the least..  So now I have to back the truck down to a more level platform, so it is cramp the wheels as you go into reverse as the truck just sort of takes off wherever those ball bearings are rolling to, then jam the brakes and slide.  Well you get the idea.  I did this twice.  At that point we decided to turn around and go the other way on the loop which was much safer.

So, we went around to the west and came up the back side of the mountain, and it was much easier.  We went by Bob Ford's grave, well former grave, he got moved back to Missouri, but the reason they moved him is that after 1892 when he was shot, men kept coming over and peeing on his grave.  They hated him because he was known as a back shooter, he shot Jessie James in the back of the head when he wasn't looking, so the men here hated him and pissed all over his grave.  

Then on up to Bachelor, the ghost town where we saw a big ol' cow elk and a bunch of deer, and then on down to another mine that is being reconstructed for tours.  This place is trippy, when you park you stop very abruptly as you notice it is straight down for a very long ways, and way down below about a thousand feet I could see where I had just done my spinning out routine detailed above.  Cynthia just about hyperventilated on this one, and she did not like having that truck near the edge of the precipice, so I stopped ten feet back and put on the parking brake.  This mine still has an immense amount of amethyst, a semi-precious stone which is almost found with a vein of silver.  They had some jewelry there that had some real knock out stones.  Anyway, that mine will start guided tours in about two weeks so we will go back, and go down into the bowels of the earth… I guess.?  The guy guiding us around, we were the only people there, affirmed that there is still so much silver around here it beggars the imagination.

So, Creede is pretty neat.  A person could retire here, but the winters are 20 below, and snow, so it won't be me.  We sure have a great country though.  I am convinced that America has so much wealth left in it that we will never know just how much it really is.


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