Crow Hill Almanac

Last Friday night, the band took the show on the road~



Pranksters in Breckenridge, Three20 South


Jeff, Monette and Gil

It was only a two hour drive there, and we got a place for the night with the Hawkins family. The kids all had fun together, we had a good time with good friends, and the view was sweeeeeet. :)



Clear and crisp, it was a beautiful day to drive home. Over Hoosier Pass








and into Alma. Just within Fairplay is...


a historic reconstruction of an 1880s mining town! Thirty-four buildings (seven on their original sites) and over 60,000 artifacts were moved from abandoned camps and ghost towns around the South Park basin. So to me, it was pretty much the Most Fabulous Place Ever, but we couldn't go inside this time since we had to be back in time to get Gretel from the kennel. This is South Park, Colorado! This place had a sort of official-looking sign by the door. Mr. Hankey welcomes you~ Howdy ho!



There is a monument to a burro named Prunes.




A prospector named Rupe Sherwood and Prunes worked "all mines in this district" together for nearly fifty years. No ordinary pack mule, Prunes could be sent from a camp with a written order, find his way down the trail to town and to the general store, wait to be loaded up with the goods and carry them back to camp. In his very old age, Rupe had to spent winters in Denver, but the town of Fairplay took good care of Prunes and fed him when Rupe was away. All winter, Prunes walked up and down the streets, stopping at each house for a generous handout. Rupe returned in the summers, and the two old friends spent the few warm months together in the hills. Prunes died at age 63, and Rupe the next year, at age 81. The town of Fairplay built this memorial~ Rupe's mining tools and Prunes' shoes, their graves together, companions forever.

This little town was so weird and wonderful. I can't wait to go back! I could have spent all day looking at the old buildings.




Taking US 285, this is Mount Silverheels~

named after a dance hall girl from the mining camp of Buckskin Joe, called Silverheels for the silver decorations on her dancing shoes. A smallpox epidemic hit the camp in 1861, and Silverheels was the only woman who stayed to care for the miners. She nursed and tended to the sick men until she caught the pox, too. The town took up a collection in gratitude, nearly $5000, but when the miners brought it to her, her cabin was deserted. Silverheels either died alone or left town, her beautiful and kind face scarred by the pox. A ghostly black-veiled woman is sometimes seen placing flowers on graves around the cemetery in Buckskin Joe.

Into the South Park basin, over 900 square miles of grassland at 10,000 feet~






Then over and down Kenosha Pass



through the aspens and towards home.