This Colorado Mountain Is Hollow

Some towns keep their history in a museum. Creed Colorado keeps it in the rock. 26 million years ago a volcano collapsed here and cooked silver right into these mountains. Men found it in 1889 and spent the next 80 years digging it out. They say there's 200 miles of tunnel under these trails. Today I'm taking my jeep up the bachelor loop to find out what they left behind. Mining structures cleaning to the cliffs at 10,000 feet, the towns those miners lived in, and maybe a few of the locals who know this terrain better than anyone. Then I'm heading down into Creed, a boomtown that kept burning to the ground. So you know what they did? They put the fire department inside the mountain. This is a place where everything worth finding is in the rocks. Let's go see what we can dig up. This is Recon America presented by Onyx Off-Road. There's just something special about waking up to a brisk Colorado morning. The birds chirping, the air is fresh, good cup of coffee. It's good to be back in Colorado. I've been spending a few days out here exploring some of the lesser known trails and towns and today I'm just outside the town of Creed. I found this really beautiful mountain camping spot last night. This morning I'm going to head down and head up to another trail that I've never explored before but I've done a little research on. This should be an amazing adventure. Let's go see what we find. You fall into a bit of a rhythm a few days out here. Wake up with the sun, a little coffee, break camp, then pick a direction. Back home there's always a to-do list and emails waiting for me. Out here the biggest decision I have all day is which trail to take. It takes me a couple days for those noises to quiet down but once it does man it's hard to beat. People ask me why I keep doing trips like this and sure it's the trails and it's the history but really it's mornings like this one. A quiet camp, a mountain road, and no place I have to be for a while. And after a few days of that I feel recharged. In a way a weekend at home never quite gets. All right I've got a lot to see today. All right I've just come down the mountain and I'm about a quarter mile from the road but two interesting points of interest that are worth noting here just a little ways back was a hunting cleaning stand. So if you come out here and you get yourself an elk or a deer you can clean it before you hit the road. That's a really nice little spot. And then there's two shooting locations right down here which I'm always trying to find some good places to do a little plinking and these spots are really nice. They've got a good backdrop, they've got some tables, got trash cans. These are some of the cleanest shooting locations I've ever seen. So I have marked all of this stuff on Onyx Offroad and Onyx Offroad is the sponsor of this Recon America series and using Onyx to find places like this and mark them so you can come back. So next time I'm coming through here if I want to find a good camp spot I've already got one marked. If I want to find a good place to maybe do a little target shooting now I've got a good place to do that. I will leave a link down below guys where you can download this entire route that I'm doing today and also use my code and get 20% off Onyx Offroad. All right we're gonna hit the pavement and then we're gonna be back on the dirt again. From the end of the trail to downtown Crete is less than five miles so camp to Main Street before my coffee even went cold. I've got to cut through downtown to reach the next stretch of dirt and from what I'm seeing out the window this place deserves more than a drive-by. I'll be back later today. I've reached the trailhead for our mission today which is to go explore the bachelor loop and this is going to be a pretty easy trail but there is a lot of mining ruins to see along the way. I'm really excited to dive into some of that history but as I was driving through town I noticed this one and only gas station which is it's very remarkable and I was like wait a minute several years ago Regina and I stopped to get gas there and kept on going and we didn't bother to come check out the town or any of the cool points of interest here or any of the trails and now I'm like you know we should have taken a few minutes to do that and I think at the end of this video you may want to take my advice next time you're passing through here and just stop and check out what's here. There's a lot of trails out here but our mission today is to go explore the bachelor loop which is one I've been wanting to do for a while so let's go see what we find today guys. The bachelor loop runs about 17 miles with a few optional spurs if you want to get deeper into the backcountry. Today we're sticking mostly to the loop. We started just around 9,000 feet and over the next couple hours I'll be climbing to almost 11. In a built jeep that's no problem but in the late 1800s you were doing this on foot on horseback or dragging a wagon behind you and that's if the weather cooperated. Try climbing 2,000 feet on horseback up in the winter here. The men who worked these mountains did exactly that and the first piece that was left behind is just up the canyon. It didn't take long to get to our first stop and this did not disappoint. This is exactly what I was hoping to see today. This is the Commodore mine and it is just one of many stops along the way and it is massive. I don't know how many stories high that is but it is a huge structure. The amount of timber that is used to build this structure and then to shore up these retaining walls which there's retaining walls here up in the mountains along the ridge here where I think there was maybe a railroad. Wow and then just way way way up in the in the mountains here there's even more structures up there. What a huge operation. You know I've been to many mines over the years. This is up there with one of the biggest ones. This is incredible. This is beautiful. I'm so glad we came here. I could stay here for a couple hours. Unfortunately it doesn't look like you can really get into it but just standing here and seeing it from the trail is pretty impressive guys. I hope we see a lot more of this. Everything we just looked at was the front door. Below it five levels of tunnels dropping 1,500 feet and 200 miles of tunnel. By 1912 this one mine alone had already produced 16 million ounces of silver. At today's prices with silver being as expensive as it is that's right around a billion dollars. Men worked for around 80 years and when it was done they walked away and left everything here standing. Well that was a proper climb coming up from the Commodore mine and thankfully there was a couple pull-offs because there was a jeep coming down and I pulled off to the side and it was a father and son that I got to talk to that are on a month-long trip together which is really cool. I love hearing stories about you know fathers and sons making memories together like that because I've got a lot of great memories with my boys out in places like this. Now it's leveled out a little bit and opened up and there are just mining remnances and structures all over the place here. It's really cool but there's something just up ahead we're going to stop and check out. Talking with that dad and his son really put a smile on my face for the rest of the climb up. My first big overland trip was with my oldest son It's still a trip we talk about a lot. Trips like that stick with you for both of you. All right our next stop is just ahead. Wind's kicking up now we're coming up the mountain a little bit. One of the things down at the kiosk that I snapped a picture of is that the Forest Service has marked a lot of these spots along the way so you know what these are and this is site number four which is the Weaver town site and got this structure here and it looks like there's more up there so and you can see just way up in the mountains up there all kinds of tailing piles, lumber, mining structures. Pretty cool let's see what we find. In the early 1890s a few hundred people lived right here working the amethyst and the last chance mine. In fact you can see the last chance from here right up on the mountainside. We'll get a closer look at that one later. Weaver had cabins families and even a school. The silver crashed in 1893 and within a couple years the town just about emptied out. The whole life of this place built boomed and abandoned and what's left is what you see after a hundred plus years of harsh winters. Here's a fun fact about this next couple miles of trail that most folks don't know about. There are aspen trees all along the trail and the mountainside and groves like this usually aren't a bunch of separate trees. It's one living thing. A single root system sending up trunk after trunk sometimes for thousands of years. Every aspen tree trunk you're looking at might be the same tree. That's pretty amazing. As the aspen start to thin we're coming up to the next stop of the loop and this one has a story that's a little different than the rest. This is the Midwest mine. It ran from 1911 clear into the 1970s. Two main tunnels, decades of work, money sunk into this mountainside and after all that time this mine never recorded any production. Not one payday. The mountain just never gave it up but everything they built is still sitting right here beside the trail. So this is pretty cool. So you can see there's a old mine shaft over there. It's all caved in but then there's some cart train tracks coming out here under whatever this structure is and then they split off and one set goes into the buildings and the other set goes out here and then just drops off into nothing and it makes you wonder like what was in that nothing once upon a time. I know I'm stopping a lot more today than I normally would on a trail adventure but it's kind of the goal is to check out all this relics that's out here. I mean this old cabin is well over a hundred years old and this is actually a pretty large cabin when you think about building a cabin up here in the mountains out of nowhere. This one has a pretty large room and it even has two additional rooms. Probably a family living up here maybe. Makes you wonder but you know this is over a hundred years old and there's still some wall standing. That's not too bad considering the harsh conditions that this thing has to endure up here at 10,000 feet in Colorado. You know the roof's gone, the floor's gone, but they did a pretty good job of building this a hundred years ago. It just makes you wonder though who was living up here? What were they doing? What were their winters like? We just passed through about a mile or so of private property ranch land. Beautiful area. I would love to own a piece of property up here but now I'm at marker number nine which is Allen's Crossing and this is where you take a left and you head back down another route to finish up the Bachelor Loop. However, if we keep going up a little bit there's supposed to be the Equity Mine and I want to go check that out. So for most of the morning doing the Bachelor Loop I didn't really see any places to camp but ever since taking that right past Allen's Crossing I've seen lots of nice spots up here. A couple that are kind of tucked in, got some shade, a little bit of protection from the wind. It would be cold up here because we're at some pretty high elevation but boy you come up here in July or August I would definitely camp up here. Yeah some good spots up here now. Now that we're up here guys some good spots. We are just a couple miles away from the Equity Mine and we'll see what What an incredible drive coming up that mountain and of course the wind has picked up now that we got up here and we got up here to the Equity Mine and well it's gated off. This is private property so you win some and you lose some and we've won quite a bit today. We've seen a whole lot of great structures but this one we're not going to be able to get close to. You can see two buildings off in the distance and you can see the entrance to the mine but this is about as close as we're going to get but we're not done. We got to go back down the mountain get back to Allen's Crossing and then we're going to take a right and continue on the bachelor loop and there's still I think five or six more points of interest to see along the way. That was the peak elevation of our day just shy of 11,000 feet and the nice thing about running a trail in both directions you get a second chance at everything you missed on the way up. I got my first wildlife sighting of the day. I don't know if you can see her but there's a big old moose down there in the water and as I was driving down the mountain I was just kind of looking in marsh area where all the brush is because that's oftentimes where you might see a moose and sure enough there she is about ankle deep in the water just sticking her nose in there foraging drinking doing what moose do. The mining ruins have really been the highlight of this entire trail but this stretch along the marsh the best scenery of the day and from here it's back down to Allen's Crossing where we make the turn and start heading down the mountain and remember that mine I spotted up in the hill from the Weaver? The last chance mine? We're finally about to check it out and let's just hope the name isn't an omen. Ah a little disappointment is setting in. One of the points of interest that I've heard so much about up here is the last chance mine and I just took the left off of the main trail to come down here and check it out and it's closed on Wednesdays. Wednesdays! Today's Wednesday. All right well there's an excuse to come back. And that's the last mine of the day. From here the trail drops us off the mountain and puts us right back into Creed. Not a bad morning's work. A mountain full of mining history one very photogenic moose and one locked gate. All right time to go find lunch. Okay as I was coming down the trail I saw a sign on a tree it said Ponderosa Pine and then up in the top of this hill you could kind of see a structure and so I stopped walked up here not really sure what this is. It's old and there's a chute that comes down and then you've got this big tub that's got these gears on it and it looks like a wheel that was probably belt driven by something and then there's some other kind of catcher down here so I don't know if they were bringing ore through here and crushing it and bringing it all the way down or who knows I'm just I'm just speculating but it is pretty cool I love seeing old gear and stuff like this. One more stop on the bachelor loop before I hit town. The Creed Cemetery. I was looking for one grave in particular Bob Ford the man who shot Jesse James. Ford ran a saloon here in Creed until 1892 when somebody gunned him down too. I never did find his grave probably for a good reason. A couple months later after he was killed his widow had his body dug up and moved to Missouri so no wonder I couldn't find him. Welcome to the small town of Creed Colorado and behind me is the Creed Visitor Center where you can get lots of great information about the town itself and the surrounding areas and had I stopped by here this morning they probably could have told me that the last chance mine is closed on Wednesdays but that's okay. Like many other small mining Colorado towns Creed has been restored and it's got a little tourist flavor to it now and we're going to go check it out and see what it's got and then I want to get a bite to eat and more importantly I want to check out this fire department that I've heard so much about so let's go check out and see what the town's got. Creed was founded in 1890 and today fewer than 300 people call it home but in 1891 at the height of the silver boom there was more than 10,000 people packed into this canyon. Everything you're looking at was once one of the biggest boom towns in Colorado. These days it's still a busy place with travelers rolling in through the summer months and you can easily spend a couple hours poking through the olive oil, fudge, coffee, a few outdoor shops too if you showed up needing hiking boots or a fishing rod. The old general store is worth a stop all by itself. Shelves of all period correct stuff and a wall of photographs going all the way back to the mining days. If you want to dig deeper into the history there's a museum right in the center of town and on the edge of town they run mining tours that take you deep into the heart of the mountain. Just plan ahead they only run three a day. When you get hungry do what I did and follow your nose. Big Doug's barbecue. I got the pulled pork and chicken plate, beans and potato salad. I gave serious thought to buying an extra order of that chicken and beans just to throw in the fridge for the drive home. But my last stop in town was one I'd been waiting for all day. Remember how I said Creed kept burning down so they put a fire department inside the mountain? I wasn't kidding. In 1976 this town went to work, donated equipment, donated explosives and every hour of labor volunteered. Six years and three tons of later they'd blasted a working fire station straight into solid rock. The main tunnel runs 139 feet into the mountain with the trucks parked in branches angled off like tree limbs. It never freezes, it never overheats, 50 degrees year round, no furnace needed. Total cost less than sixty thousand dollars and the whole thing is fireproof because it is the mountain. Well Creed is a great little town. Lots of great shops, the people are so friendly and lunch oh the chicken and the beans guys I would come back just for those. Those were awesome. The trail today was amazing. All the old mining history but I think the icing on the cake was definitely the fire station. Fire station in a cave. You'll never see that anywhere else I don't think. I have had such an amazing time today and such an amazing time these last few days here in Colorado but now I've got a two-day drive home so I've got to start working my way back. A huge thanks to Onyx for sponsoring this Recon America episode and guys if you're not subscribed to Trail Recon make sure you hit that subscribe button and if you are subscribed hit that like button. Let me know you enjoyed hanging out with me for the last couple days. Until next time, safe travels.