Meet Rita: the 21-foot recycled wood troll guarding a ghost town near Victor, Colorado

Rita’s a giant with a gentle mission

Kneeling in the dirt at nearly 10,000 feet, a 21-foot wooden troll pushes stones into the ground on a windswept hillside outside Victor, Colorado.

Her name is Rita the Rock Planter, and she didn’t end up here by accident.

Danish artist Thomas Dambo built her in the summer of 2023 out of recycled wood, old pallets, and fallen pine branches.

Rita is free to visit, open dawn to dusk, and she’s one of the least crowded Dambo trolls in the country. But the mountain she sits on has a story that goes back long before she arrived.

Victor’s gold rush left 500 mines in these hills

Victor was born in 1894 when gold brought thousands of prospectors to this corner of Colorado. At its peak around 1900, roughly 18,000 people lived here, and more than 500 mines punched into the surrounding hills.

The Portland and Independence mines made this place one of the richest gold fields in the country, earning Victor the nickname “City of Mines.”

A fire leveled the business district in 1899, and residents rebuilt it in brick within six months. That same brick-lined main street still stands, with a population of about 400.

Rita took shape in 10 days flat

Dambo and a crew of volunteers started building Rita in late July 2023 and finished on Aug. 3. She was his 119th troll at the time, and volunteers from the Victor area helped at every stage.

Her face came from wood shipped over from Dambo’s studio in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Everything else, her body, her hair, her hands pressing stones into the earth, came from materials sourced right here.

A local nonprofit called the Gold Camp District Impact Group, known as gcDIG, funded the whole thing and threw a town festival the day after she was completed.

She’s patching up the scars miners left behind

Dambo writes a backstory for every troll he builds, and Rita’s is hard to separate from the ground she kneels on.

According to her story, Rita woke from a long sleep to find the mountainside full of small holes left behind by miners from the 1800s.

She worried a squirrel or a child might fall in, so she started collecting stones and plugging the holes one by one.

Dambo never spells out the environmental angle, but surrounded by old mine ruins, the image does the work. Rita is a giant quietly fixing what humans left broken.

Dambo has built trolls on five continents

Thomas Dambo was born in Denmark in 1979 and studied at Design School Kolding.

He started building birdhouses from scrap wood as a kid and eventually scaled that impulse into something much larger.

In 2014, he launched what he called the “Trail of a Thousand Trolls,” a lifelong project to build 1,000 troll sculptures from recycled materials around the world.

He has since built more than 100 across more than 17 countries. Each one uses discarded wood that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

Millions of people track his creations using his online Troll Map every year.

Rita was stop nine on a 100-day coast-to-coast road trip

Rita came out of Dambo’s 2023 “Way of the Bird King” project, a 100-day drive across the United States during which he and his crew built 10 trolls from the East Coast to the West Coast.

The trip started in Vermont and ended in Washington state, with stops in New Jersey, Michigan, Portland, and the Seattle area along the way. More than a thousand volunteers helped build the 10 sculptures.

Each troll used locally sourced recycled materials and told a story tied to where it landed. Victor was the only Colorado stop.

Colorado’s first Dambo troll got moved after going viral

Rita isn’t the first Dambo troll to plant roots in Colorado.

Isak Heartstone went up in Breckenridge in 2018 for the Breckenridge International Festival of Arts and blew up on social media almost immediately.

The 15-foot sculpture drew so many visitors that neighbors started complaining about parking, trash, and crowds. After town council debates, Isak was taken down and rebuilt near the Illinois Gulch trailhead in 2019.

That experience directly shaped how gcDIG chose Rita’s location outside Victor, far enough from town to spread out the foot traffic without losing the experience.

Colorful birdhouses mark every step of the trail

You won’t need a map to find Rita. Dambo lined the trail with handmade birdhouses in bright colors, and they run from the trailhead all the way to the sculpture.

The birdhouses are a signature of his work, a callback to his earliest recycling projects as a kid. Follow them up the path and they’ll bring you right to her.

They also give the trail a storybook feel that works whether you’re hiking with kids or on your own. Every one of them is built from scrap wood, the same material that became Rita herself.

Old mine ruins and mountain ranges share the view

The trail to Rita passes through land that still carries the marks of the gold rush. Historic headframes and the structure of the American Eagles Mine sit along the path.

In summer, wildflowers fill the meadows between the ruins.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountain range stretches out to the south, and the sky at this elevation runs wide and open in every direction. Weekday mornings, you can often have the whole hillside to yourself.

It’s the kind of place where the quiet catches you off guard.

Two trail options, both under a mile

Getting to Rita is straightforward. From the upper parking lot, the trail runs about 0.2 miles on flat, easy ground.

From the lower trailhead, located roughly one mile west of Victor on Highway 67, the hike stretches to about 0.8 miles with more elevation gain and longer views.

Look for the dirt parking area on the left side of the road. Either way, stay on the marked trail.

The meadow ecosystem around Rita is fragile, and the wildflowers don’t recover quickly from foot traffic. At nearly 10,000 feet, the altitude hits harder than the distance, so bring water and give yourself time.

Rita put Victor back on the map

Since Rita arrived in 2023, local business owners have seen more foot traffic in a town that had been fading quietly for decades. She pulled in hikers, art fans, families, and people who had never heard of Victor before.

gcDIG keeps the trail and the sculpture maintained through community donations.

For a town with 400 residents and no stoplights, a world-recognized artist choosing this hillside matters. Rita didn’t change what Victor is.

She gave people a reason to come find out.

No fee, no reservation, no excuse not to go

Rita the Rock Planter sits on her mountaintop year-round, free to visit, no tickets required. The hike is short, the views are wide, and the sculpture is unlike anything most people have seen.

If you care about public art, mining history, or just want to stand next to a 21-foot wooden troll at 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies, this is the trip.

She kneels in the dirt with both hands full of stones, doing her slow work on the mountain. All you have to do is show up.

Explore Victor, Colorado

You can spend a full day in Victor and still not cover everything.

The brick-lined downtown is compact and walkable, and the Victor Lowell Thomas Museum covers the town’s gold mining history in depth.

Five miles away in neighboring Cripple Creek, the Cripple Creek and Victor Narrow Gauge Railroad runs seasonal scenic train rides.

If you’re there in July, Gold Rush Days brings parades, live music, and family events to the streets. Victor sits along one of Colorado’s most scenic drives, and fall brings aspen color to the surrounding hills.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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