Silverton

The narrow-gauge Durango & Silverton Railroad takes three and a half hours from Durango to cover the forty-five miles to Silverton. For much of that distance the train runs along ledges above the Animas River gorge — the gorge walls dropping away on one side, the river running white and cold a thousand feet below, the train moving at the deliberate speed of something that knows where it is and does not need to hurry. I had taken the train in late August on a day when the sky above the San Juans was building into the afternoon thunderheads that are the meteorological signature of Colorado summer, and the light alternated between that oblique clarity before a storm and the sudden dark when the clouds moved across the sun. When the train rounded the last curve and Silverton appeared — the town’s one main street, its Victorian facades, the peaks rising directly from the buildings in every direction — I understood why the railroad has been running this route since 1882.

Silverton sits in a high valley called Baker’s Park at 9,318 feet, hemmed in by mountains on every side that exceed thirteen thousand feet. The town has around five hundred year-round residents. The main commercial street — Greene Street — runs six blocks and contains most of what constitutes civic life here: a few restaurants, a couple of bars with wood stoves and the particular smell of places that burn wood all winter, a handful of shops, a hotel or two. The architecture is Victorian mining-town vernacular — brick facades with decorative cornices, false fronts, the occasional painted mural. Nothing is precious. The buildings have been used and are being used.

The history is immediate here in a way that tourist towns usually aren’t. Silverton’s silver mines made fortunes between 1876 and the 1890s, then the silver market collapsed and the town contracted and stayed contracted and never quite recovered enough to reinvent itself as a resort. The result is a town that still looks largely as it did in 1910, not because anyone preserved it deliberately but because there was never enough money or ambition to replace it. The Old Hundred Gold Mine, open for tours in summer, takes you into a horizontal shaft drilled into the mountain in the 1870s. Inside, at forty-seven degrees and smelling of cold rock and old iron, the miners’ drilling equipment still sits where it was left. The ore cart tracks run into the dark. It is not a reconstruction. It is a room that has not been touched.

The hiking above Silverton is extraordinary. The Kendall Mountain trail rises from the edge of town and climbs to twelve thousand feet with a view of the entire valley. The Colorado Trail passes nearby. And the rough, unpaved roads that lead to the old mine sites above treeline — Engineer Pass, Cinnamon Pass, Stony Pass — require four-wheel drive and reward it with a survey of the San Juan high country that feels genuinely remote: tundra, abandoned mine structures, the occasional marmot, and views of peaks that no road in Colorado approaches more closely.

I ate dinner that night at a table in a restaurant on Greene Street where the elk burger was made from an animal that had been in this valley a month before. The cook came out to refill water glasses himself and asked what I’d done that day, and I told him about the train ride, and he said the train was still the best way to arrive and always would be. “It slows you down,” he said. “You can’t rush this place. It won’t let you.”

When to go: July and August for hiking and the Durango & Silverton Railroad in full operation — summer is brief at this altitude and the trails are at their best. September for quieter trails, the beginning of the aspen color, and the excellent light that arrives after the summer monsoons end. The railroad runs limited service in spring and autumn; winter access is by vehicle only over the mountain passes, which are sometimes closed for days at a time.