The Slate River and the Ranching Valley
Near Crested Butte, Colorado
Northwest of town, a clear stream winds down through wide green meadows. This is the Slate River, and it tells the other half of Crested Butte's story, the part that was never about mining. The Slate runs nearly twenty four miles from its source high near Yule Pass, in the rugged Raggeds Wilderness, down to meet the East River just below town.
While miners worked the coal seams and the silver camps, other families ran cattle across these bottomlands, and ranching sat right alongside mining and railroading at the heart of the local economy. Some of those hay meadows are still worked today. Along the river you will find a spot called Oh Be Joyful, named for Oh Be Joyful Creek, which tumbles down in a chain of waterfalls past hillsides thick with summer wildflowers.
In recent decades, conservation groups have worked with ranchers to protect the Slate River wetlands, keeping the valley open, the water clean, and the working landscape intact. When you look across these meadows, you are seeing the quiet, enduring economy that outlasted the mines, the one built on grass, water, and cattle rather than coal.
