Sunday Jun 30, Creede Mining tour

It was misty this morning after a light rain last night. This RV park is very dark at night and very quiet. Mostly Texas folks here. The couple next to us are from Texas and they have been coming here for a month in the summer for many many years. They live in their RV (5th wheel job) year round, don’t own a house and love it that way. They go back to Texas for winters and travel around, but always come here for the month of July.

Very few bugs, maybe it’s too early, but that is welcome.

We went to MJ’s Cafe in Creede for breakfast. Good little busy diner. The town of Creede is one of those silver mining towns that grew to 10,000 people in three years and then collapsed in the mid-1890’s when the price of silver dropped out. Same as Tombstone. The population is only a few hundred people and relies on tourism in the summer. They built an underground mine museum which kind of blows my mind. In 1992 three guys started drilling and blasting a hole in the side of the mountain for the fire department and decided it was going so well they kept blasting until they had enough room for the museum and a community room. The museum is very well run and the exhibits are sequential and numbered. You’re given an audio headset that talks you through the whole place and back to the gift shop. It looked like a single woman ran the whole place. That must be a good money-maker for the town.

Next we climbed up a well maintained dirt road called the Bachelor Loop to get a tour of the Last Chance mine. It was abandoned in the mid-1980’s and a man named Jack Morris  bought it for a song in 1998 with the understanding that it would be used as a museum. Our tour guide was Bobby, and he did a great job on our 45 minute tour. The tour was just long enough to get the gist of silver mining, a different deal than copper mining. Bobby claimed that there was as much silver left in the place as they took out, but they were committed to the museum thing. The silver just sits there patiently.

We climbed a little further on the Bachelor Loop than the Last Chance Mine and then the road ended because of a rock slide.

Deb here for the rest! The woman working at the museum had  told us about Freemon’s Ranch and General Store, saying we had to stop there if heading to the falls, so we did. Delicious burgers and waffle fries, which we enjoyed sitting at a picnic table on their porch. By this time the sun had come out and it was a beautiful day. Freemon’s is only a stone’s throw from North Clear Creek Falls (supposedly the second most photographed falls in the U.S.?), so we traveled there and made the short walk to the falls. Really spectacular and different, with the water coming out of the meadows and dropping deep into a chasm. Hard to explain but stunning. 

Since we visited North Clear Creek Falls our next destination was South Clear Creek Falls. Access to these falls involved a bit of a hike in, and I'm happy to report that Milo’s new knee is doing great! Smaller falls and a more traditional setting, but also beautiful. And I have to note that the wildflowers here are amazing. I probably took pictures of 15-20 different varieties, and I have yet to see a columbine (the Colorado state flower). Maybe tomorrow…

After the two falls, two different mining museum venues and lots of spectacular scenery we made our way back to our campground near South Fork. We stopped briefly at Marshall Park Campground, our USFS campground for the next 2 nights to get a preview.

Finally arriving back at the campground at 5:30 pm we realized we’d eaten such a late lunch that neither of us were hungry for much dinner. We each had yogurt and fruit, read our books, talked with the neighbors and called it a night.