Carson Ghost Town

Some places call us repeatedly to return. For most of my family Lake City, Colorado, is such a place, starting with our grandparents in the late 1940s. 

The ghost town of Carson, with timberline just above (Photos by Narca)

Not too far from Lake City are the ruins of Carson, the ghost of a mining town that once thrived high in the San Juan Mountains, slightly below the Continental Divide. A miner, Christopher Carson, staked claim to the Bonanza King in 1881, and within a few years a town of 400 to 500 hardy souls had sprung up. The town's establishments included a livery stable, hotel and restaurants. Gold and silver briefly flowed, but winters proved too difficult, silver was devalued in 1893, and the town declined to extinction after the early 1900s. Its sheer inaccessibility presented a huge challenge to would-be residents.

Stampede to Timberline, Muriel Wolle's fascinating account of Colorado ghost towns, notes that Carson was built on an iron dike and therefore attracted far more than its fair share of lightning strikes!

Clumps of Mertensia are beautiful against the weathered gray wood.

Today, Carson is one of the best-preserved of Colorado's old mining camps, thanks to funding provided in large part by the federal government. New metal roofs have halted the disintegration of many of the cabins.

Yellow-bellied Marmots inhabit Carson today, as they no doubt did 100 years ago.

Beyond Carson, the wild San Juan Mountains beckon.

My grandparents spent most of their summers in Lake City, and the trip to Carson was a familiar one. Back then, the tiny town dump still held treasures of old purpled glass. Then, as now, the road up Wager Gulch to Carson required high clearance and 4-wheel-drive. When you reach Carson, you step back in time, to the era of oldtime, hardrock mining. What stories must haunt these log and plank walls!

Bighorn Sheep are among the rarer mammals of the San Juans. This bachelor group was spotted by our friend Jim Shiflett, between Creede and Lake City, during our June trip.

Today the high country around Carson is as exhilarating as ever. Lynx prowl the area. In most summers, the high mountain meadows are thick with flowers and butterflies. This year, after the lack of winter snow, a few flowers bloom, but it's only a ghost of the normal display.

Scarlet Gilia blooming at Carson

One of the yellow alpine paintbrushes...

... and its rosy relative, both at Carson

The only butterfly much in evidence is the Arctic Blue. On this cool, rainy day, they are hunkered down on the big composites, and little else is flying.

Arctic Blue clings to a composite on this chilly day.

Beyond Carson stretches a mountain wilderness. The old jeep road over the divide at Carson and down into Lost Trail Creek has degenerated into a simple trail. Barely accessible even in the 1950s and 1960s, Lost Trail was a lure for fly fishermen, because it still held a healthy population of native Cutthroat Trout. Our family would occasionally plan a camping trip to this wilderness, where, for shelter, we erected our tent within the log walls of a fallen-down cabin.

Today, while the others explore the road to the divide to see what shape it's in now, I walk alone through the spruce forest, past beaver ponds, and past the ruins of this cabin-with-a-view, which is perched above Wager Gulch and the distant valley of the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River.

Clouds shroud the high peaks. I see no Lynx, but this American Red Squirrel charms. 

American Red Squirrels are a close relative of Douglas Squirrel from the Pacific Northwest and Mearns' Squirrel from Baja California.

The songs of Hermit and Swainson's Thrushes spiral around me. Drumming woodpeckers duel. Mountain Chickadees and warblers feed their young. Mountain air is sharp and scented. How good to be back in the San Juans!

Copper Tales

Last week Alan and I set off for Lake City in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, on a butterfly expedition with our good friend Noel Snyder. For two years, Noel has been daydreaming of Tailed Coppers, ever since I found them along Henson Creek on an earlier trip. So, naturally, the first day found us exploring Henson Creek in search of Tailed Coppers and their flighty relatives. And coppers we found!

Two views of a Tailed Copper

Mixed in with the Tailed and Ruddy Coppers were quite a few Coral Hairstreaks, a species I had only seen previously in Missouri.

Coral Hairstreak on composite

Most were nectaring at composites, which flourished along the roadside with Colorado Columbine, wild rose, geraniums, and the familiar, wonderful Common Fireweed, its soft purple blossoms blending so beautifully with the blue-green of its foliage.

Henson Creek originates in the 13- and 14,000-foot peaks of the San Juans, and rushes down to join the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. Here I spent many months of my childhood, in this quintessential country of the high Rocky Mountains. The main changes in the intervening decades have been the level of use for recreation––now very high indeed!––and the proliferation of second homes, where once only wild strawberries cloaked the hillsides. Returning here is bittersweet. But masses of flowers still riot in the high country, chipmunks scamper away at every bend of the road, Prairie Falcons still hunt the tundra, and Uncompahgre is still lord of the high peaks of southwestern Colorado.

Common Fireweed

(All photos by Narca)

And, yes, the old-fashioned soda fountain still operates in the town of Lake City, and though it now is a gift store rather than a general store, the ice cream remains outstanding. My grandfather being partial to ice cream, we often stopped here in the 1950s and 1960s for chocolate milk shakes after an evening of boisterous square dancing or an exhilarating day of jeeping or fly-fishing.

Pity Alan and Noel! They are about to be subjected to endless tales of mother lodes and miner's lore, of Lynx and Mountain Sheep, of our inner-tubing club––the Blue-bottomed Butt-busters––with its initiation rite of a 10-mile tubing trip in the icy waters of the Lake Fork of the Gunnison. The Lake Fork has a chance to warm up ever-so-slightly, because its waters are held in the natural lake of San Cristobal. First innner-tubers adjust to that, then when Henson Creek converges with the Lake Fork, they are slammed with another icy blast as the water temperature drops even further, to 52º! Yes, Lake City....

Tomorrow we seek our long-sought-after grail butterfly, the Lustrous Copper!