Gothic and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

A few miles up the valley from Crested Butte sits the ghost town of Gothic, and it holds one of the most remarkable science stories in the American West. Gothic was born in eighteen seventy nine as a silver camp, and during the boom of the eighteen eighties, estimates of its population vary widely, with some accounts describing several thousand residents and more than two hundred buildings, while other sources put the number far lower. When the silver market crashed, the town emptied almost overnight, and by the nineteen twenties it stood nearly abandoned.

Then in July of nineteen nineteen, a professor named John Johnson walked into the ruins and saw something no prospector had. He saw one of the richest natural laboratories imaginable, a high mountain valley bursting with plants, insects, and animals. He began bringing students to study among the old cabins, and in nineteen twenty eight he formally founded the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

Since then thousands of scientists have worked here, and they have published more than fifteen hundred studies on subjects like pollination, climate change, and mountain ecology. One of its most famous projects is a study of the yellow bellied marmot that began in nineteen sixty two and has run ever since, one of the longest running studies of a wild animal anywhere on earth. A dead silver town became a living observatory.