Most ghost towns are just rubble: St. Elmo, Colorado still has 40 buildings standing

St. Elmo’s still got a pulse at 10,000 feet

Most ghost towns are just a foundation and a historical marker. St. Elmo is something else.

About 20 miles southwest of Buena Vista, up a canyon road that follows a cold creek through the Sawatch Range, nearly 40 original wooden buildings from the 1880s still line the main street. The general store opens every summer.

Chipmunks run the place. And the mountains surrounding it will stop you mid-step on the way to your car.

The road into town is half the trip

From Buena Vista, you head south on US 285 to Nathrop, then turn west onto County Road 162.

For the next 15 miles, Chalk Creek runs alongside you while the canyon walls close in and the Sawatch peaks fill the windshield. The Chalk Cliffs show up along the way, pale and crumbling against the dark pines.

The last stretch turns to dirt, but it’s well-graded and most cars handle it without trouble. By the time the first buildings come into view, you’re already in another century.

You don’t need a Jeep just to get here

That’s what makes St. Elmo different from a lot of Colorado’s old mining sites. The main road in is mostly paved, and a regular sedan can get you there.

No long hike, no trail head parking, no shuttle. You drive straight into the 1880s.

The town sits at nearly 10,000 feet in the Sawatch Range and earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. For a place this well-preserved, the access is almost suspiciously easy.

From Forest City to boom to bust in 40 years

Prospectors arrived in the late 1870s, and by 1880 the town had a name, a railroad and a population pushing 2,000.

It started as Forest City, but the post office already had too many of those, so the founder, Griffith Evans, pulled a name from a novel he happened to be reading at the time. St. Elmo stuck.

At its peak, the town ran a schoolhouse, five hotels, five restaurants, two sawmills, a telegraph office, and a newspaper called the Mountaineer.

Walk Main Street the way miners once did

The buildings on Main Street look close to what they looked like during the boom years.

You’ll pass the Home Comfort Hotel, the old schoolhouse, and the Miner’s Exchange, which dates to 1892 and served at different times as a bank, a saloon and a general store. The rebuilt town hall now holds a museum of local history.

Nearly every structure along the street is privately owned, so you stay on the public path and look without touching. The scale of what survived here doesn’t hit you until you’re standing in the middle of it.

The Mary Murphy Mine drove the whole economy

The biggest operation in the area, the Mary Murphy Mine pulled millions of dollars in gold and silver out of the mountains before it shut down in the 1920s.

The Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad reached town in 1880, and that connection made it possible to move ore out and supplies in at a pace the wagon roads never could. When the mines went quiet, the railroad followed.

By 1922, the tracks were gone, and so were most of the people.

The Stark family stayed when everyone else left

After the mines declined and the railroad pulled out, the town emptied fast. One family didn’t leave.

The Starks bought up abandoned buildings and converted them to summer cabins for tourists.

By the 1940s, siblings Annabelle and Tony Stark were the only people living there year-round, without electricity or running water, watching over the place so vandals couldn’t pick it apart.

The buildings standing today are standing partly because two people refused to walk away from them.

A 2002 fire and the rebuild that followed

In April 2002, fire took out five buildings, including the original 1890s town hall. It could have been the beginning of the end.

Instead, Buena Vista Heritage stepped in with support from the State Historical Fund and private donors. The town hall was rebuilt and opened as a museum in 2008.

The schoolhouse was restored and opened as the St. Elmo Schoolhouse Museum in 2006. A nonprofit formed in 2010 to keep preservation work going.

The privately owned properties around town continue to be maintained by the people who own them.

Chipmunks that will climb into your hand

A colony of chipmunks lives in and around a woodpile near the center of town, and they’ve been there for years.

Pick up a small bag of sunflower seeds at the general store, find a spot to sit, hold out your hand and wait. Within a few minutes, one will climb right up.

Kids lose their minds over this, but so do most adults. They’re wild animals, so move slowly and don’t grab.

The chipmunks run the show here, and they know it.

Hummingbirds, wildflowers and fall color in the canyon

The general store crew sets out hummingbird feeders every summer, and the birds come in numbers. Dozens of them work the feeders at a time.

Out past the town limits, the national forest land around the Sawatch Range holds deer, elk and a long list of mountain bird species. Wildflowers cover the meadows through July and August.

Come back in September or early October and the aspens along Chalk Creek go gold against the evergreens. The crowds thin out by then, and the canyon gets very quiet.

Drive Tincup Pass over the Continental Divide

The old mining roads out of St. Elmo are still there, and some of them go high.

Tincup Pass, accessed from County Road 267 just outside of town, climbs to 12,154 feet and crosses the Continental Divide. The road was originally built in 1881 to connect Chaffee County to Gunnison County by wagon.

Today it takes a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle, and it’s typically passable from late June through September. If you don’t have the right rig, ATV and side-by-side rentals are available in the area.

Snow, snowshoes and a ghost town in winter

Summer gets the crowds and the open general store, but St. Elmo doesn’t close when the season turns.

The main road stays passable through winter, and the area draws snowmobilers and snowshoers who want something to look at other than a groomed trail. The buildings wear snow well.

For a ghost town at 10,000 feet, being accessible year-round is not the norm. If you want Main Street to yourself, January is a pretty good bet.

Buena Vista and Salida, both nearby, have lodging, restaurants and hot springs to round out the trip.

Visit St. Elmo Ghost Town in Colorado

To get there, take US 285 south from Buena Vista to Nathrop, then head west on County Road 162 for about 15 miles. There’s no admission fee to walk the town.

The St. Elmo General Store opens around mid-May and runs through late September. It’s worth stopping in even just for the chipmunk food.

If you plan to run Tincup Pass or explore toward Hancock, you’ll need a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle. ATV rentals are available nearby if you don’t have one.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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