Colorado Ghost Towns

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Colorado

Colorado Ghost Towns

Colorado’s ghost towns sit high in the Rockies, where thin air and hard winters preserved entire mining towns intact rather than reducing them to foundations.

3 towns documented
Gold & Silver Mining

Animas Forks

An 11,200-foot silver camp with the highest newspaper in America, buried by a 23-day blizzard and abandoned when its steel mill and railroad failed — now a preserved ghost town on the Alpine Loop.
Zinc Mining

Gilman

A company town perched on a 600-foot cliff above the Eagle River, built by the New Jersey Zinc Company. Ordered evacuated in 1984 and now a fenced-off Superfund site.
Gold & Silver Mining

St. Elmo Ghost Town

One of the best-preserved ghost towns in the Rockies, with original 1880s storefronts still standing at 10,000 feet and reachable by regular car.

Explore the Map

Interactive map of Colorado’s mapped ghost-town sites. Click a marker for details.

A Short History of Colorado’s Ghost Towns

Few states have more ghost towns than Colorado, where silver and gold rushes filled the high country with camps clinging to slopes above timberline. Animas Forks, at more than eleven thousand feet in the San Juan Mountains, was one of the highest, a silver camp that once claimed the highest newspaper in the country and endured brutal winters and avalanche danger before thin ore and altitude defeated it. St. Elmo, in the Sawatch Range, tells a gentler version of the same story: a gold and silver town along a railroad grade that emptied as the mines and the trains gave out, but survived remarkably intact, with its false-front stores and homes still lining the main street. Together they show the two fates of Colorado’s camps — dramatic ruin and quiet preservation.

Getting There & Access

St. Elmo is the easier visit, reached by a paved and then well-graded road from the highway near Buena Vista, with a seasonal general store and parking; most cars can make it in summer. Animas Forks is a true high-mountain destination, reached by rough four-wheel-drive roads out of Silverton that are only open in the warmer months and demand high clearance, careful driving, and attention to fast-changing mountain weather. At these elevations, afternoon thunderstorms, snow at any season, and thin air are real factors. Carry water, layers, and a full tank, start early, and check current road and pass conditions before committing to the backcountry routes.

Public Land & Responsible Visiting

Most of Colorado’s ghost towns lie on national forest or Bureau of Land Management land, often surrounded by private mining claims. Historic buildings are fragile and protected — do not enter unstable structures, remove artifacts, or dig around foundations. The mountains are honeycombed with old shafts and adits that can be deadly, so stay well clear of any opening. Keep vehicles on designated routes to protect the slow-growing alpine tundra, which can take decades to recover from a single set of tire tracks. Pack out all trash, yield to uphill traffic on narrow shelf roads, and treat the surviving buildings of places like St. Elmo as the irreplaceable record they are.