June 23rd - Cripple Creek, Colorado

We had picked our campsite to be near some of the Convention Volksmarches, and the walk for this day was Cripple Creek, Colorado, about 30 miles up the road. I cooked a nice pancake breakfast with real maple syrup, and we sugar-and-carbohydrate loaded in preparation for the walk. As we drove south on Colorado 67, we entered more rugged terrain and finally dropped over a ridge onto a small valley with the town in the center.

We were directed to the free parking garage for the casinos that line main street. That was even a better deal than parking in downtown Denver for $3.00! The starting point was the community center and it was already crowded with walkers, but we signed in and were quickly on our way. The walk route led us thru the town and up a small hill to a cemetery, and we were already starting to breathe deeply and feel the 9,500-foot altitude.

We cut back thru town to a welcome center cum bed and breakfast that was intriguing because the building had once served as a hospital. The rooms were completely refurbished to be a first-class bed and breakfast, but they had preserved the labels on each of the rooms that showed their former use as well as having a few period artifacts like antique wheelchairs in the halls. It was amusing to think of the implications of staying in a bed and breakfast in a room marked “Maternity” or “Nursery”! However, that is almost certainly better than staying in one labeled “Imaging”, which has strange implications to say the least.

From the old hospital/B&B we walked back downhill into town and over to a narrow-gauge steam locomotive, which was huffing and puffing in preparation to hauling tourists on a tour of the gold mining area of the valley. Cripple Creek was a very big gold mining boom town at the turn of the century, and altho most of the mines have played out there is one large gold mine still operating at the other end of the valley. We were still in walking mode, however, so we walked back into the mining district along a very nice path that had explanatory plaques every few hundred feet.

The altitude was really getting to us by this point, and it was good to have an excuse to stop every few feet on the uphill stretches. The highest point on the walk was a final loop around in back of Mollie Kathleen mine, which is no longer in operation but now offers tours of the old mine shaft. Walking downhill back to the start finish was a cinch because the route was straight down the hill and along the main street.

The main street had many well-preserved turn-of-the-century buildings, and part of the reason the buildings were so well preserved was legalized gambling. It was virtually lined with casinos, somewhere around 7-10 all together and gave a similar impression to Deadwood, South Dakota, of a historical town turning to gambling to survive. We stopped for lunch at Nolan’s Casino because they offered a daily special of beef stroganoff for $4.95. We ate in a mezzanine area above a collection of slot machines. The food was delicious but the noise from the slot machines was a continuous low clatter of hoots, toots, and whistles that I found somewhat distracting. From Nolan’s it was just a couple of blocks back to the finish point where we collected our award, a 3” x 3” wood plaque with Cripple Creek on it.

The old steam train we had seen earlier intrigued us, so we drove back up the hill to take a ride on it. The ride was short, only about 45 minutes long, but a lot of fun. The conductor/fireman gave us a commentary on many of the mineshafts and abandoned workings we passed on our way along the edge of the valley. He mentioned the sad fact that the original prospector who found gold and started the gold rush died a penniless man at his sister’s boarding house in Colorado Springs. He did not, of course, mention how many folks were losing their life savings in Cripple Creek every year due to the legalized gambling, but I don’t expect that anyone is keeping track of that.

For the rest of the afternoon, I wanted to explore a “shortcut” from the town of Victor over to Highway 50 near the Royal Gorge where the Tuesday Volksmarch was scheduled. Highway 67 to Cripple Creek continued on to Victor about 9 miles up the road, but then there was a gap with the indication of an unpaved road. We drove up to Victor and our first problem was finding where that unpaved road started—all the roads out of Victor turned immediately to dirt and none of them was properly marked. We drove down a couple of dead ends and finally found that the dirt road past the emergency heliport was the correct one.

The surface of this road immediately turned into a rough washboard of dirt and gravel. That wasn’t so bad, but it gave us an ominous portent as to what lay ahead. We next saw a sign that prohibited vehicles over 25 feet in length. Then we saw a sign that prohibited vehicles over 8 tons on any of the bridges. Finally we saw a sign that declared the next 21 miles were “High Risk” road with sharp curves. Let me tell you, if the State of Colorado puts up signs for High Risk and sharp curves, you had best believe them. We found that out the hard way.

Right after that sign, the road further deteriorated to a barely 1-lane dirt road winding around the side of a mountain with a rock face on our left and a sheer drop off to the valley below on the right—no guard rail or anything else, for that matter. The speed limit was posted at 20 mph and only a fool or someone with a death wish would have tried to go any faster. If I had been all alone on it, I think I would have been OK, but I kept encountering traffic trying to come against me. It went like this: we’d both come around a blind corner—they were all blind—and slam on our brakes, skidding to a stop with a couple of feet between our bumpers. Then we’d look around and see who had the shortest distance to back up to the next wide spot in the road. Finally, the “loser” would back up to the wide spot and the other driver would inch around trying to not have his wheels slip over the cliff.

If we hadn’t managed to stop, a collision would have certainly sent both cars plunging off the cliff into the rocky gorge below. I expect that airbags or no airbags that would have meant certain death—when we were here in 1972 I saw the remains of a beautiful 1966 Mustang that had gone over the cliff into a valley. You know that long, sloping hood on those Mustangs? Well, this hood had been rolled back into the passenger’s compartment, where it met the trunk and rear bumper. Basically the car was rolled into a 4-foot wide Tootsie Roll of metal, and I don’t somehow think the driver survived. Trying to avoid a similar fate, I took to honking the horn repeatedly as I edged around each of the blind corners (did I mention they were all blind corners?). It may have been an unnecessary precaution, but a vivid imagination is sometimes all that keeps me alive.

Monika had a rather different experience since she could enjoy the scenery, which was really spectacular. This road was listed as Scenic Backcountry road or something of the kind, and it certainly was that. It was hard on the truck’s suspension and harder on the driver’s nerves, but if you really want to see some of Colorado’s gorges “up close and personal”, take the drive from Victor south to Highway 50. Just plan on taking over an hour to complete the drive, because that’s what it took us—we decided to try a different route to get to the walk the next morning.