A wild road to the highest city in North America

Located on a lonely mountain plain in Colorado ski country, the silver-rush-era town of Leadville holds secrets as deep as its tunnels and old mine workings.

The highway climbs through aspen forest glinting gold in the Sun, rising through zigzag gullies, escarpments and precipices onto a high mountain plain so lonesome it seems to hum with silence. Snowdrifts huddle at the road's verges and on it goes persistently, almost gasping for air, past lonely farms beneath besieging summits.

There are many superlative road trips to take in North America, but if you find yourself on US Route 24, driving through Lake County in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, know you are on an old road to somewhere extraordinary.

Among the places on this storied route is Leadville, with a reputation often chalked up to its elevation. At 3,109m (10,200ft), it's the highest incorporated city in North America. But while the town is always in danger of being dwarfed by the surrounding landscape, the setting also reveals much mythology about Colorado's most lionised subjects: the gold rush and the Wild West.

"So many people, Americans included, are so unfamiliar with our story," said Katie Hild, manager of Leadville's Tourism and Visitor Center, housed today in the original red sandstone American National Bank building. "This is a town that's been shaped by bust and boom – so much has happened here."

The triumph of Leadville, as Hild puts it, is its many strata. The first mineral deposits were found in the area's California Gulch in 1860, and, within a year, around 10,000 prospectors had flooded the high plain, with more than $3m in ore extracted. By 1880, Leadville was served by three railroads, and between 1878 and 1884 the town had freighted 54 million ounces of silver. Soon, rich seams of zinc, iron, gold and lead were being quarried.

"Mining is our root and some of the largest pockets of precious ores on the continent have been found here," added Hild. "At its peak, there were 30,000 people in Leadville, but by 1893 silver prices had plummeted and the glory days were over nearly as quickly as they'd begun."

Exploring Leadville nowadays is a kind of treasure hunt – and much of this deep history can be absorbed in the Mining District outside town in the foothills below Mount Sherman. The Route of the Silver Kings, once the backdrop for one of the richest mining camps in the US, reveals 14 original structures and 20 sites from the era that visitors can explore on a signposted gravel road. Incredibly, the US Bureau of Mines estimates there are 1,329 shafts, 1,628 prospect holes and more than 200 miles of workings, all hidden beneath the surface. 

For many, the 21-mile circuit represents more than just a charmingly loose collection of mineshafts. Rather, the ghost towns and, most dramatically of all, the buckled headframes and mining camp hoists have come to embody an idealisation of the American dream. It is telling that the names of the camps are Silver Spoon, Diamond Dolly, Upper Oro and Hopemore. But those with a silver gleam in their eyes are advised against any Indiana Jones type antics: all treasure hunting and metal detecting is strictly forbidden.

Leadville's name evokes tin-hatted miners picking through ore, but the town turns out to be equally infused with the spirit of a Wild West film set. There are around a dozen beautiful buildings that sag characterfully, bringing to mind the rootin' tootin' cowboy country of Buffalo Bill and Doc Holliday, both of whom visited during their late-19th-Century heyday. Walk south down Harrison Avenue from the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum and on the left is the Delaware Hotel, once a premier lodging for mining magnates. A few blocks away, you see the Tabor Opera House, constructed by silver baron Horace Tabor in 1879, and where miners and madams once mingled.

Locals might tell you Oscar Wilde once performed there, while such was the fiscal boom that an additional door was built to get circus elephants into the opera house. One night, illusionist Harry Houdini is also said to have disappeared through the stage's trap door. It's easy to understand how he must have felt. Entering Leadville today feels like slipping through a portal into another time.

Perhaps the most engrossing example of the street's preserved architecture is a timber-clad landmark across the road: the Silver Dollar Saloon, where tipplers can still order a whiskey under the diamond dust mirrors at the original wooden bar from 1879.

"You couldn't label Leadville as the capital of the Old Wild West, especially when weighed against other legendary towns like Dodge City or Tombstone, but it certainly played a pivotal role during the transformative gold and silver rush eras," said Adam Ducharme, Lake County's tourism and economic development director. "Walk into the Silver Dollar Saloon and you're not just stepping into a bar – it's an immersion into a living relic of this time."

But wherever you go in Colorado in winter these days, the subject everyone is obsessed with is not silver dollars, but snowfall — and 11 miles farther along US Route 24, the next chapter in Leadville's untold history is slowly revealed.

Ski Cooper isn't Colorado's most celebrated mountain resort, but where it beats others in the state is it retains the authenticity of a mountain as it used to be. Non-profit and municipality owned, it looks out to Mount Elbert, the state's highest mountain at 4,399m (14,433ft). More than that, the landscape has the emptiness that purists seek away from the surrounding busier towns.

"Cooper is not a resort, but a place to come skiing," said head of operations Patrick Torsell. "We only have three lifts – nothing compared to the mega-resorts – but Leadville locals have a strong relationship with us and our history. It's a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the parking lot kind of place."

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Likewise, this is a mountain that covers its tracks well. For this is where Colorado's ski culture began.

The story starts with the first mountain unit in US military history, the 10th Mountain Division of World War Two. In summer 1941, its soldiers received extensive training in winter warfare on Cooper Hill, constructing what was then the world's longest draglift. Then, in the winter of 1944-1945, three of its regiments marshalled a series of surprise attacks during a surprise offensive in Italy's Apennine Mountains. It's a melancholy tale: around 1,000 soldiers were killed and 4,000 injured. And yet, their actions were instrumental in Germany's later surrender. 

What many don't know is following their return to the Rockies, the 10th's veterans shaped the American ski industry. More than 66 ski resorts were managed or founded by former military personnel, including Aspen, Vail and Arapahoe Basin – and this taps into a broader strain of patriotism among locals today.

At Arapahoe Basin, during the 1953-1954 season, for instance, the unit installed the first Poma lift in the US. Then, in 1957 at Winter Park, they constructed two draglifts said to be the fastest in the world. The division's backcountry cabins, once used for deep-snow combat training, are now open to visitors to book year-round.

But that's not all. Six miles from Leadville in the Pando Valley, the 10th Mountain Division trained at Camp Hale. Sitting between sheer-sided rocky spurs and snow-daubed mountains with the Eagle River winding nearby, it was once a sprawling encampment of 14,000 soldiers, 226 barracks, 100 mess halls, three theatres, a chapel, horse and mule barns and a hospital. Little remains nowadays, but a 10-stop self-guided tour of relics snakes past ammunition bunkers, a guard shack and a field house. To be so rapidly transplanted from pistes to pistols fires the imagination.

The best story at Camp Hale concerns the CIA, which took over the base in the 1950s to train secretive special ops teams. At one time, 170 Tibetans were drafted in for secret operations against the Communist government in China. The unexpected coda is locals were told it was a test site for bombs. Nowadays, with snowshoe, hiking, biking and horse-riding trails, it is a less-assuming and simpler world away from the currents of history.

In few places in Colorado are the ghosts of the past so alive as on US Route 24. Leadville, this Wild West city in the clouds, is faithful to this picture. It then comes as a bit of a shock to head out on the road out of town, to leave the Old West and silver-rush-era mines behind in the rearview, to return to the 21st-Century of haulage trucks, roadside fast food stops and gas stations framed by the Rockies, in all their glory.

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