The Ghost Town of Dyersville, Colorado

The Boreas Pass Road is right treacherous.  It's a dirt road in the White River National Forest, and it skirts the unguarded tops of high cliffs.  The road is narrow in most places, and the drops are long and sheer.  Not even the flimsiest of guardrails exists for emotional support.  In places, the road squeezes narrowly through rock fissures.  Boreas Pass Road ascends the steep flanks of Bald Mountain over bumpy rocks and deep potholes.  It's maybe a 6-mile drive uphill to Indiana Creek Road, where you hoof-it down to the scattered remains of the old mining camp of Dyersville.  The scariest thing about this road is that it's pretty heavily traveled.  People haul their big campers up here with pickup trucks, and they "camp" along the edges of cliffs.  (By my standards, it's not "camping" if you've got a camper, but you do you.)  I really didn't want to meet one of those rigs coming toward me on Boreas Pass Road, and fortunately I did not.

And this is Bald Mountain as seen from Indiana Creek Road, the place where you park to hike into the ghost town.  These ugly clearcuts are found throughout our national forests, increasingly so as the Trump regime monetizes our public lands for the sake of his billionaire cronies.  

From all that I can find online, Dyersville was a short-lived mining town that was founded in 1881 by a tough Methodist clergyman and prospector named John Lewis Dyer--affectionately known as "Father Dyer."  All we found at the town site was a ruined boardinghouse, pictured here, and a livery stable, pictured below.

A livery stable was a place where you could pay someone to care for your horses while you were in town.  You could rent a horse or pack-animal here as well.  Rev. Dyer took refuge in this valley from the raucous frontier settlement of Breckenridge, along with his third wife, in hopes of leading a quiet life.  But the good parson staked a claim here and opened a lead mine, which attracted the exact sort of people he was fleeing--hard-up miners from all the world over, desperate men who up-and-left all they knew for a chance at striking it rich.  Many of these newcomers were drinkers, and carousers, and gamblers, and brawlers.  Father Dyer and his wife didn't like the element that had followed them here, and so, after just a few years in the town they founded--the town that bore their name--they moved on.  The lead mine dried up, and the town was abandoned.

This shot was taken inside the ruined boardinghouse.  It's not a large place, but it has a lot of windows for a log structure.  The interior was probably partitioned flimsily in order to created a degree of privacy for lodgers.  

Here's Indiana Creek Road, wending its long dusty course down to the path that leads to Dyersville.  Colorado has a whole lot of things named after Midwestern states.  Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa feature prominently in the place names of Colorado.  My brother had never seen a ghost town, so we learned about this one online.  It's not a commercialized ghost town with tours and well-preserved buildings.  It's a genuine ghost town with little left to prove that 150 souls briefly called it home.  I found out after returning to our Airbnb that the old lead mine is only a quarter mile from the town site, along a clear path.  After the harrowing drive up the mountainside in a rented car, I told my brother that he could drive back downhill while I went fetal in the backseat.  But once we got back to the car, after exploring Dyersville, I recovered my courage and drove the downward course as well.  That night, I dreamed of falling off cliffs in a Nissan Sentra.