FROM MINING TOWN
TO VACATION MECCA
The story of Breckenridge begins with a lonely
prospector working his way up the Blue River in 1859.
A glint of yellow on the riverbed, the discovery of gold
ore, and an unnamed town was born. Within a few
years, the encampment had swelled into a small town
of 100 souls, complete with its own stagecoach stop and
post office. A narrow-gauge railroad would soon follow,
making the trek to and from Denver for thousands of
miners. Thirty years after the first discovery of gold,
two prospectors named Tom Groves and Harry Lytton
pulled 13.5-pound nugget from the mountains, and a
gold rush was on.
News of the massive nugget was part of the larger
Colorado Gold Rush which drew thousands to the high
alpine. But the extreme environment of Breckenridge
in particular required a special kind of prospector.
Summer forest fires were followed by months of
unrelenting snowfall with accumulations so deep that
the townspeople resorted to digging tunnels to get from
home to home. Eventually, most of the known major
veins of ore had been exhausted. As the industry slowly
faded, so did the town, with the population dwindling
from 3,000 to fewer than 400 by 1950. Breckenridge
appeared to be on its way to becoming one of Colorado’s
famed ghost towns. Little did anyone know that the
snow itself—not gold—held the key to the town’s future.
A handful of other Colorado mining towns were about
to share an extraordinary and yet unforeseeable fate—
becoming part of the wave of destinations to gain
iconic status. These were towns such as Aspen, Telluride
and Crested Butte—and of course Breckenridge. A full
century after that first nugget was drawn from the Blue
River, a ski trail was cut just to the west of town on Peak
8 of the Tenmile Range, followed by the installation of
the first ski lift. More trails and lifts would follow, with
the resort expanding to the north and south, eventually
encompassing the surrounding Peaks 6 through 10.
By the 1960s and 1970s, skiing had become nearly as
popular in the U.S. as it was in Europe. The ski towns of
Breckenridge Bikers.
Photo Credit: Colorado Historic Society
Boreas Pass Road Railroad.
Photo Credit: Colorado Historic Society
Colorado flourished, taking on an outsized fame relative
to their size. With their dry, light powder, the skiing was
arguably better here than in the ski towns of the Alps—
destinations such as Chamonix, Davos and Kitzbühel—
where the snow tends to be wetter and heavier.
But as Breck’s ski industry grew, its heritage as a mining
town commensurately diminished. It seemed only a
matter of time before it was erased entirely. The locals,
most of whom came for the skiing, would make sure this
never happened.