Of course, just because I had legal access didn’t mean this particular explore would be easy. No, life is never that simple- I blew the high pressure fuel pump on my car ten miles out from Ashcroft. The wise decision would have been to immediately head towards the closest auto shop and hope I’d make it before my engine gave out, but I decided that since I was so close I might as well visit the ghost town anyway and worry about it afterwards instead. But we’ll get to that.
. . . . . . . . .
I nervously glanced down at the warning light on the dashboard as it glowed ominously in the darkness. I chewed the inside of my cheek. The yellow center line of the highway blurred past beneath my headlights as the engine sputtered, my hands clenched on the steering wheel. I eyed the GPS. Ninety two miles until the next town.
I had to believe I’d make it that far. I didn’t have a choice.
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Figure 1: The remnants of Ashcroft, with a gravel walking trail laid where the main road once ran.
The earliest histories are always the hardest to nail down thanks to the spotty record keeping of the era, but fortunately our tax dollars were hard at work in the US Forest Service to make my research easy with those aforementioned plaques. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ashcroft’s history starts like most of the history of American colonization- with stolen land and white settlers strong arming the Native American populace in pursuit of wealth.
The Ute Indians, who call themselves "Nuche", left only scant evidence of their presence near Ashcroft. The Tabuache group of the Northern Ute Tribe established summer hunting camps in the upper Castle Creek valley, returning to the area along the Colorado River west of Glenwood Springs for the winter. The Ute people believe water that flows from the earth is sacred and frequently made camp near confluences of rivers such as Castle Creek and Express Creek and near springs such as the neighboring Ute Springs in Aspen. In 1873, Chief Ouray signed a treaty to cede the Elk Mountain territory to the U.S. government in order to maintain peace. The Ute Indians were moved to a reservation in northeast Utah and were banned from the area by 1881, the same year prospectors incorporated the town site of Ashcroft.
-Aspen Historical Society
Figure 2: The remnants of a miner’s cabin.
In 1880 a pair of prospectors surveyed the Castle Creek Valley in search of silver. It wasn’t long before they found it, and when word of their discovery reached the mining hub of Leadville it immediately kicked off a silver rush. The miners wasted no time and in just two weeks they had laid down the streets of a new town, built a courthouse, and founded a Miner’s Protection Association union to resolve disputes. Originally called Castle Forks City, the town was renamed Ashcroft in 1882 after another rich ore vein was struck in a nearby mine.
In just three short years Ashcroft had gone from nothing to a busy mining town boasting well over 2000 residents at its peak, with some estimates placing the population as high as 3500 people. Some of the plaques installed by the Aspen Historical Society offer a glimpse of what life was like for the average Ashcroft miner at the time.When Prospectors flowed into the Castle Creek Valley in the summer of 1880, they brought with them expectations of how a town should look. After laying the streets out in a typical grid pattern, the Ashcroft Town Site Company sold the camp's 864 lots for five dollars each. By 1882, lots were selling for between $150 and $400. As much money could be made from "mining the miners" as from mining the silver…
-Aspen Historical Society
For you economists out there, that converts to about $510 out of a $5167 yearly income when adjusted for inflation. Of course, by 1900 Ashcroft had long since declined, so it’s entirely possible that miners actually spent more during the glory years.Typical of all mining camps, Ashcroft sported its share of saloons. As soon as the first tents sprang up, a saloon keeper was there to "wet the whistles" of thirsty miners. Ashcroft supported 16 to 20 saloons during its heyday. On average, nearly three-quarters of the male population of mining camps was single. Saloons, bars, and men's clubs offered the lonely miner a social diversion. Tabulations from mining engineer Charles Armstrong's 1900 diary showed that he spent 10% ($14) of his $142 yearly income on liquor. He frequently remarked that he had spent his money for "no good." Dan McArthur kept the Blue Mirror Saloon running, even after the town had busted. His establishment served as a social place to catch up on gossip for the hardy souls who remained in the Castle Creek Valley.
-Aspen Historical Society
Figure 3: The Blue Mirror Saloon, once the last watering hole in town. Now it serves as employee housing for seasonal interns from the Aspen Historical Society.
Figure 4: The remnants of another miner’s cabin.
A well-insulated cabin was essential for the long, cold winters of Ashcroft, which averaged 18 feet of snow annually. Ashcroft was built on the stage route from Aspen to Crested Butte along an east/west orientation. Had the cabins faced south, they would have been warmed naturally by the sunlight. Common insulation materials such as burlap or newspapers were easily obtained and inexpensive. Both were fire hazards. Burlap could also be used as a ceiling if planks were not available. Sometimes the cloth was covered with calcimine, an inexpensive paint mixture of zinc oxide, glue, water and coloring.
-Aspen Historical Society
Transportation and communication were the lifeblood of a mining community. For a new camp to survive, it had to overcome isolation as quickly as possible. Roads (old stage road under trail) were necessary to haul supplies into the camps and valuable ore out to the processing plants. Toll roads, toll bridges and stage lines sprang up immediately. By 1881, there were two stage lines, the Rockwell Stage and the Carson Brothers Stage line, running on the newly completed road from Aspen to Ashcroft and Buena Vista with a fare for wagons drawn by two animals set at $2.00. Telegraph lines were also important to advertise the success of the mines, attract investors and promote the camp. Ashcroft's two newspapers, the Journal and the Herald, needed the telegraph to get news from the outside world.
Prior to the arrival of trains in 1887, stagecoach lines were the main form of transportation to remote areas like Ashcroft and Aspen.
-Aspen Historical Society
Feeding the population of Ashcroft was extremely difficult and expensive. A short growing season and high altitude (9,500 feet above sea level) made it necessary to haul in most food supplies. Subsisting on a diet of dry beans, canned foods, potatoes, bacon, bread and coffee, residents of Ashcroft added wildlife to their menus. Elk, deer, trout, rabbit, grouse, bear and even marmot populations were severely impacted. The elk herds were so decimated that elk that had to be reintroduced to the area by train from Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 1913. It is often possible to identify the former location of a cabin by the remaining gooseberry bushes planted by the miners next to their cabins as a source of scurvy-preventing vitamin C.
-Aspen Historical Society
Figure 5: The few remaining buildings of Ashcroft in the background. A small thicket of gooseberry bushes next to a depression in the earth mark where a cabin once stood in the foreground, and remnants like this easily outnumbered the still-standing buildings three to one at least.
Figure 6: The remnants of a general store, decorated and partially restored with items from the era.
Occupational risks aside, life in Ashcroft was a hard but profitable one for the intrepid miner. Unfortunately for them, this prosperity was not to last. Ashcroft only lasted five short years before its fortune ran out, and people fled the town as quickly as they had arrived. The silver deposits ran dry sometime around 1885 and the completion of two new railroads in Aspen in 1887 enticed residents of Ashcroft to seek greener pastures there, with many former residents quite literally picking up their entire life and dragging their small cabins to Aspen with teams of horses.The health of silver miners was constantly in jeopardy. Six of every 1,000 Colorado miners died from work- related accidents during the Victorian era. Mines were unpleasant places: cramped, dark and either dusty or wet. Helmets were simple felt hats hardened with wax, and only a single flickering candle provided light around each miner. Miners were killed and injured by cave-ins, avalanches and unstable explosives. Thick dust from constant drilling filled their lungs and caused silicosis (black-lung disease). Epidemics of typhoid, diphtheria, smallpox and scarlet fever caused by unsanitary living conditions swept through new camps. Because of frequent avalanches along the trail to Ashcroft's largest mine, the Montezuma- Tam-O'Shanter- elevation 11,500 feet- a bunkhouse was built near the mine.
-Aspen Historical Society
The silver market crash of 1893 was caused by the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 by the United States Congress. Under the act, the US Government became the second largest buyer of silver in the world to artificially stabilize the price of silver and prevent supply from outstripping demand on the open market. The US Treasury minted all that silver into currency, and the massive influx of new coins quickly led to runaway inflation. When the act was repealed in 1893 to halt said inflation, the price of silver dropped like a stone and miners across the country found themselves fleeing boom towns once they were unable to turn a profit. Ashcroft was no exception.Mining towns boomed and busted according to the whims of geology, economic markets, and, in the case of silver, the U.S. government. Ashcroft, a silver mining town founded in 1880, gambled against these forces and lost. At the height of Ashcroft's boom, over 2000 people lived here. High transportation costs, shallow silver deposits, competition from Aspen, and ultimately the 1893 silver market crash destroyed the viability of the town. Ashcroft's population plummeted to 100 by 1895. In 1912, when the U.S. Postal Service suspended mail delivery to Ashcroft, the town claimed only 50 residents.
-Aspen Historical Society
Figure 7: Several of the still-standing wooden buildings along the main street of Ashcroft.
Figure 8: The interior of one of the buildings shown in Figure 7, with a metal bedframe in the corner.
By the beginning of the 20th century the only residents left were a small handful of older single men. Allegedly they continued prospecting for a decade or two afterwards, but by most accounts they spent more time hunting, fishing, and trading stories about the glory days in the town’s last saloon than they spent actually mining anything. These old timers hung around for a few decades, but by the time the Great Depression rolled around most of them had died out.
Jack Leahy lived in Ashcroft for 57 years. He offered legal advice, although he never took a bar exam. He was Justice of the Peace but never had any cases. Only in Ashcroft could he reinvent himself into a philosopher and a man of the law. Leahy and a handful of men like him clung to the declining town. With Ashcroft's marginal economy, information was the most important commodity. Postmaster Dan McArthur earned only $1.50 per month, handling an average of 254 pieces of mail. Gossip he heard at the post office was then dispensed along with beer and whiskey at his saloon, the Blue Mirror. Joe Sawyer, a retired lumberjack from Koch's Lumber Mill, moved into an Ashcroft cabin in the mid-1930s for the summers, wintering in Aspen. Although he didn't originally live in Ashcroft, he told the stories as if he had… Leahy died of malnutrition in 1939 and was Ashcroft's last permanent resident.
-Aspen Historical Society
Figure 9: The remnants of another wooden storefront. This one contains an old sign hung up by the Aspen Historical Society that was stored here after it was replaced by an informational plaque.
Figure 10: Another empty cabin sitting along the main row of “intact” buildings.
That seemed to be the end of Ashcroft, but a ray of unexpected hope came in the form of two world-renowned athletes. In 1936, American Olympic bobsled champion Billy Fiske and his business partner Ted Ryan set their sights on Ashcroft. Though the town was empty aside from Leahy and perhaps one or two other old timers, they had big plans.
But the onset of World War II ensured that this dream would never become a reality. Billy Fiske joined the Royal Air Force as a volunteer fighter pilot and was shot down over Sussex during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Gravely wounded, he survived long enough to reach a hospital but died of surgical shock (blood loss) on the operating table shortly afterwards. With his business partner dead, Ted Ryan abandoned his plans to turn Ashcroft into a ski resort. In 1942 he leased the ghost town to the US Army, where the 10th Mountain Division used it as a training ground to prepare for the harsh winter combat they would face in the mountains of Italy.In 1936, Ashcroft's newest prospectors turned their attentions to skiing and tourism. The beauty and recreational potential of the Elk Mountains destined Ashcroft to become one of Colorado's first ski areas. The Highland-Bavarian Corporation acquired over 1,000 acres of land surrounding Ashcroft with a large European- style resort in mind.
-Aspen Historical Society
Figure 11: The old hotel is the largest derelict building still standing in Ashcroft. The Aspen Center for Environmental Studies building is larger, but that one remains in use by the organization of the same name.
Figure 12: The interior second floor of the old hotel.
During the post-war boom Aspen once again stole Ashcroft’s thunder, and the ski industry set up shop there instead. Aspen became one of the most successful ski towns in North America while Ashcroft languished, a status Aspen enjoys to this day. Ted Ryan deeded Ashcroft to the US Forest Service at some point after the war ended and Ashcroft became federal land. It was during this period the ghost town caught the eye of the man who would spearhead its preservation.
In 1948, Stuart Mace, WWII veteran and commander of a canine division, brought his family and dog sled operation to Ashcroft. Mace lived in the valley until his death and devoted his life to restoring the ecology and protecting the area from development. The Mace family recycled sandstone from an old school in Aspen, marble scraps from a nearby quarry and lumber from a defunct coal mine to build Toklat (located across the road and now owned by the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES)), their home and business. Although he never knew them, Stuart Mace created a kinship with Ashcroft's old timers through the tales he told. In 1974, he was joined in his effort to preserve the ghost town of Ashcroft by the Aspen Historical Society.
-Aspen Historical Society
In 1976 their efforts paid off and Ashcroft was designated as a National Historic Site. The Aspen Historical Society received a US Forest Service permit to preserve and interpret the ghost town, which they continue to do today. Ashcroft is open to the public and remains a popular recreation area for hikers and sightseers.
Figure 13: One last look back at Ashcroft.
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Reading the plaques was fascinating, but once I finished my sightseeing I still had to worry about my car. Fortunately I was able to get it started, but I was still one hundred and thirty miles from home in a car that was incapable of moving faster than zero to sixty in roughly three minutes. Regardless, with towing costs in that part of Colorado reaching into the thousands of dollars I had no choice but to try and limp home anyway. This was no easy feat because my only route home took me on I70 through the Independence Pass. Anyone who’s driven that stretch of highway before knows that it’s extremely steep, curvy, and heavily populated by semi truck drivers who often like to fly down the mountain at questionable speeds.
This seemed like the perfect time to add more complications, so I picked up a hitchhiker outside Glenwood Springs just after sundown. The way I figured, I had been a stranded traveler several times in Montana and I had been helped out of some bad situations by a good Samaritan or two, so I kind of owed a debt to the universe to pay it forward now that I was in a position to do so.
The guy looked just like a doppelganger of Mike from Breaking Bad with half a dozen face tattoos, but he seemed friendly enough. Twenty minutes later he was telling me about the several warrants out for his arrest for unspecified crimes that he claimed to be heading to Grand Junction to deal with, and I started considering whether I should drive recklessly enough to make it impossible for him to take control of the car without killing us both if he tried anything funny. Hey, if mutually assured destruction was good enough for the Cold War it was good enough for picking up hitchhiking fugitives after dark, right?
Fortunately, things stayed peaceful and after about an hour of guarded but friendly conversation, I dropped him off at a busy and well lit gas station just outside Grand Junction before limping home.
. . . . . . . . .
“Here’s good,” said the man in my passenger seat as we came to a stop. The hitchhiker got out of my car and paused. “Thanks for the ride, but you really shouldn’t pick up hitchhikers. It isn’t safe.” Before I could respond, he shut the car door and disappeared into the night.
. . . . . . . . .
That busted fuel pump ended up costing me about a grand and a half and a week in the shop to replace, but despite all odds I made it home in the end. Somehow, out of all my Colorado adventures what should have been the easiest one ended up being the most stressful.
Ah well, c’est la vie. At least I got a great story out of it.
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Sources:
“Ashcroft Historical Site plaques,” Ashcroft Historical Society. 2022.
Wikipedia: Ashcroft, Colorado
Aspen Historical Society: Ashcroft Ghost Town
Colorado Encyclopedia: Ashcroft
Wikipedia: Sherman Silver Purchase Act
Wikipedia: Billy Fiske
