The nearly three and three quarters of an hour journey still takes the same length of time as the original railroad took back in the 1880s when the line from Denver to Durango was extended up to Silverton which then was a boom town of over 5,000 inhabitants servicing the needs of the mines in the area. Reportedly Bat Masterson lived there for a short time and Wyatt Earp worked as a card dealer in one of the bars for a couple of years. With up to 50 bars and gambling joints as well as 'houses of ill-repute' it must have been some place. Apparently the last whore house closed down in 1947 as the mines began to close though 'business' had been declining ever since 1942 when local girls started to 'give it away for nothing' in fits of wartime patriotic enthusiasm. Today the town has about 500 inhabitants who depend upon the 150,000 to 200,000 tourists a year that the railway brings up during the summer season when the area is clear of snow and the winter sporters who make their way up through up to 20 foot snow drifts in the winter for the skiing and boarding on nearby Silverton Mountain. Except for the highway through the town the few wide streets between buildings are just earth and the buildings lining them are mostly wooden with only one or two such as the administration building built in the early 1900s being built with brick or stone. All have rough alleys behind them - just like in every western film you have ever seen.
Shops selling cheap as well as expensive souvenirs together with others stocking extensive ranges of hunting, fishing and camping gear as well as one or two selling very expensive, up-market, tooled leather bags, belts and an amazing range of highly decorated handgun holsters. A very cold and damp few hours in Silverton ended when we took a bus back down to Durango for a journey of about an hour and a quarter on the same road that I had driven the day before. So much better to be driven than to drive it myself.One the way into Durango the bus driver pointed out the remains of a huge wildfire that had caused devastation in 2002. A fire, probably started by a careless camper, ripped through the dry forest and brush on a ridge some miles outside Durango. Apparently wildfires move up ridges as they draw air from lower down valleys until fire fighters can start to to hold the horizontal progress of the fire. This time however, the inaccessibility of the fire meant that fire fighting was very difficult . The only way it could be fought was by aerial water drops and sky diving firemen who were parachuted onto the high ridges. A number of 'slurry bombers', WWII vintage aircraft such as P-24 Liberator bombers, were also used to try to hold the fires. At the same time, on the opposite side of the valley, another fire broke out. This one was started by a 'city type' who had bought a property up in the mountains and who had an electrified fence around his land which shorted out in the tinder dry environment and set fire to the scrubland. Whether the fence was to keep down weeds or to discourage 'critters' from coming onto his land the owner shouldn't have been using it in the summer when there was a fire risk. Because all the air in the valley was being sucked out by the main wildfire on the far side of the valley, this smaller fire moved down not up its side of the valley burning out some 10 or more homes and hundreds of acres of forest and scrub. Only the intervention of some diverted slurry bomber missions saved the area from even greater destruction. The foolish 'city type' is now spending years in court explaining to a judge why he hadn't switched off his electrified fence and how many millions of dollars compensation should be paid to the people who lost homes and livelihoods because of his selfish stupidity.
The fires in 2002 were so bad that evacuation plans for most of northern Durango were in place and ready to be implemented when the wildfires came to a massive rocky outcrop. Instead of moving south the fires moved further and further up the ridges, eventually burnt out and Durango was saved. Now, five years later, the ridge line is silhouetted with the remains of burnt out Ponderosa pines but apparently Nature being what it is, aspen trees are starting to grow again up on the high ridges and wild life is slowly coming back.
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