The Boardwalk Town

The wooden boardwalk you are standing on, running along Grand Avenue, is the beating heart of Grand Lake, a town on the western side of the Continental Divide. Grand Lake was established in eighteen eighty one, in the middle of a short lived silver rush. Prospectors had found silver in the rivers and mountains nearby in the late eighteen seventies, and this town sprang up as the outfitting and supply point for rough mining camps with names like Lulu City, Teller City, and Gaskill, all of them now vanished into the forest.

For a brief moment Grand Lake was even the county seat. But the silver mines that gave the town its reason to exist failed in the early eighteen eighties, and the place had to reinvent itself. It did that by turning to summer visitors, who came for the fishing, the cool mountain air, and the lake.

Small hotels went up, then summer cottages and dude ranches. The boardwalks themselves were a practical invention. Shop owners built them as a courtesy, to keep customers out of the mud and to keep the mud off their own floors.

Today restaurants, bars, galleries, and shops line these planks, and the Wild West flavor that draws tourists was originally just an honest attempt to stay clean.