Animas Forks: Twelve Miles From Anything, Eleven Thousand Feet Up

Prospectors found silver in eighteen seventy-three at the confluence of three streams in the high San Juan Mountains, twelve miles northeast of what would become Silverton. They named the place Three Forks of the Animas, and then the post office renamed it Animas Forks in eighteen seventy-five because Three Forks of the Animas was too long for a postmark. The elevation is eleven thousand one hundred and eighty-five feet, which makes it one of the highest active mining communities in North America during the years it functioned as one.

Otto Mears built a wagon road connecting Animas Forks to the other mining camps in eighteen seventy-five, which made it possible to supply the settlement without pack animals and gave the mines a route to market. Within a few years the town had more than thirty cabins, a hotel with a piano, a general store, saloons, a drug store, and a newspaper. The Kalamazoo House, the finest hotel, had the only telephone in town.

What Animas Forks also had was weather. The basin sits in a natural funnel for winter snowfall, and the winters at this elevation were serious enough that the entire population, which reached around four hundred and fifty in the boom years, left every November and came back every May. The community functioned on a seasonal clock imposed by the snowpack, not by preference.

William Duncan built a two-story wood-frame house in eighteen seventy-nine that is still standing. It is called the William Duncan House and it is the most recognizable structure at the site, notable partly because it survived and partly because its bow windows, a detail associated with Victorian urban architecture, look incongruous at this altitude in this landscape. Someone wanted the house to look like it belonged somewhere that had been built up for a long time.

Falling metal prices in the nineteen twenties drove the last miners away. The town was never formally abandoned so much as gradually vacated, a process that continued until no one was coming back for the summer. The nine standing buildings and foundations of roughly thirty more structures are maintained today by the Bureau of Land Management. About two hundred fifty thousand visitors come up the Alpine Loop four-wheel-drive route each year. The William Duncan House is still there with the bow windows.