The Mountain Above Creede, Colorado Is Hollow and You Can Drive Right Through What’s Left

Some towns keep their history in a museum. Creede, Colorado keeps it in the rock.

Twenty-six million years ago, a volcano collapsed here and cooked silver right into the mountain.

In August of 1889, a prospector named Nicholas Creede sank his pick into a vein so rich the story goes he hollered "Holy Moses!" and kicked off Colorado's last great silver boom.

Six hundred people lived in this canyon in 1889.

Two years later, there were more than ten thousand.

Then men spent the next eighty years or so hollowing that mountain out.

Today it's said there are around two hundred miles of tunnel under the mining district, and the Bachelor Loop, a 17-mile historic trail above town, drives you right past what they left behind.

That's where I pointed Bonnie D, my Jeep Gladiator, for the newest episode of Recon America.

The Commodore Mine

Years ago, Regena and I stopped in Creede for gas and drove on without exploring.

This trip was about fixing that mistake, and the first major stop on the loop made it clear how much we'd missed.

The Commodore Mine was Creede's largest mine, and the structures still clinging to the canyon walls are massive—timber, retaining walls, buildings stacked up the mountainside.

And what you can see is the smallest part of it.

Behind that front door the mountain is honeycombed: five levels of workings dropping as deep as 1,500 feet.

By 1912, this one mine had already produced sixteen million ounces of silver, from ore that averaged 45 ounces per ton in the early years.

Men worked it for around eighty years, and when it was done, they walked away and left everything standing.

Ghost Towns, Cabins, and One Photogenic Moose

The loop keeps delivering as you climb.

The Weaver townsite, where a few hundred people built a whole town—cabins, families, even a school—that boomed and emptied out inside about four years when silver crashed in 1893.

A caved-in mine shaft with ore-cart tracks that run out of the dark and just drop off into nothing.

A hundred-year-old cabin sitting at 10,000 feet that makes you wonder who lived up there, and what their winters were like.

And on the way back down, our first wildlife sighting of the trip: a cow moose, ankle-deep in a marsh, completely unbothered by us.

The mining ruins were the highlight of the trail, but that stretch along the marsh was the best scenery of the day.

Not everything went our way.

The Equity Mine sits behind a locked gate on private property, and the Last Chance Mine—the one we'd been eyeballing from across the valley all morning—is closed on Wednesdays.

We showed up on a Wednesday.

You win some, you lose some.

And now I've got an excuse to go back.

A Fire Station Inside the Mountain

The town of Creede itself was the icing on the cake.

A few hundred people live there today, the main street is full of shops and history, and Big Doug's BBQ served up a chicken-and-beans plate I'm still thinking about.

But the stop I'd been waiting for all day: the fire station.

Early Creede kept burning to the ground, so this town eventually decided to put its fire department where fire can't touch it.

Inside the mountain.

Starting in 1976, volunteers spent six years blasting a working fire station straight into solid rock with three tons of explosives.

The main tunnel runs 139 feet in, the trucks park in branches angled off it like limbs on a tree, and it holds fifty degrees year-round without a furnace.

Total cost: just under sixty thousand dollars.

It's still the active station today, and you'll never see anything else like it.

Watch the Full Episode

The full Creede episode of Recon America drops Thursday—the Bachelor Loop, the mines, the moose, the town, and the fire station in the mountain.

Planning Your Own Run?

The Bachelor Loop is about 17 miles, starting from town at just under 9,000 feet and climbing to almost 11,000.

It's manageable in a stock high-clearance 4x4 in dry conditions, with optional spurs if you want to get deeper into the backcountry.

Grab lunch in Creede, check the mine-tour schedule ahead of time (they only run a few a day), and don't show up at the Last Chance on a Wednesday.

Trust me.

Until next time, safe travels.

Brad