So
today I went over to my cabin on Trout Lake. It's about 11 miles from
town and over 10,000 feet elevation and you'd have to try
hard to find a prettier slice of our country. It's a small crater lake
that was expanded by a small dam about 80 years ago. It's surrounded by
13,000 foot peaks that stay snow-capped all summer long. There are a
couple of deep channels in the lake and while it consistently produces
pan size Rainbow Trout of 1 - 2 lbs., there have been some lunker Brown
Trout pulled out of here as well. 
The lake is fed by high country snow and stays pretty chilly. For years it served as the water source for a hydro-electric plant down valley at Ames. If you're up on your history, you know that L.L. Nunn first generated alternating current power at Ames. Up until that time all power was DC but you couldn't transmit DC power over long distances. L.L. owned the Gold King Mine up above the lake and invented a way to generate power that he could transmit up to his mine cheaply. If you stay at The Palace Hotel next month for Inman, you can read in their history where they were one of the first hotels in San Francisco to have electric lights in their rooms - DC power. At that same time, every home in Telluride was well illuminated by L.L. Nunn's amazing AC power.
The Denver & Rio Grand narrow gauge railroad used to run around the lake. It stopped in Telluride, then up the hill to Trout Lake and on to Durango where it turned around and came back. After steaming up the grade from Placerville, they needed to replenish the boilers here at the old water tank so they could complete the climb up past Lizard Head, down to Rico and on to Durango. My Grandmother and her Austrian Paisan's used to ride the train with a picnic lunch and a few bottles of vino, get dropped off along the way to go pick mushrooms, then hop back on board when the train came back in the evening. The conductor usually kept a couple bottles in reserve so the ladies could enjoy their trip all the way back home.
This is the old trestle at the end of the lake where the train made it's bend and headed on up the hill. Some of the descendants of those early trains still carry tourists between Silverton and Durango on summer days. If you ever get up to this part of the country, you should hop the train for a gorgeous ride through the Rockies like our tougher ancestors used to do.
My
Dad built our cabin over 50 years ago. Today there are just 100 cabins
dotted around the lake and you can hardly see one from another. Over
the years we've added electric power and about half of us have running
water supplied by our own stream-fed water company. There's no phone,
no TV, radio reception only when the cloud cover is right and even cell
phones don't work here. It is blessedly quiet and nights are so dark
you can see literally millions of stars. Deer and elk wander through
our yard and we've seen bears and mountain lions and lynx and a family
of chipmunks has lived in our woodpile for several generations.
It may not be the fanciest place on earth but it's been a retreat for our family for 4 generations. I taught my kids to fish here same as my Dad taught me. I have plans drawn up to expand the cabin in the next few years and I plan to retire here, siting on the front porch overlooking the lake, a barrel of Jack Daniel's in the corner with a long straw and my laptop - writing a book about anything but real estate. That's my son with me there.
This is Mount Wilson over by Trout Lake. Colorado has more 14,000+ foot peaks than anywhere else in the country and this is one of them. Spectacular.
This
is Ophir Pass, off the old train loop. If you have a Jeep, follow that
little line that etches diagonally across the mountain there and don't
fall off. In about 11 miles you'll come out in Silverton. Or you can
take the wussy way around on the paved highway but that'll take you 75
miles to get to the same place and you won't have the adrenalin rush.
We used to drive over this when I was a kid to see our relatives in
Silverton. Those old Italians always had many a jug of home made Dago
Red and them and my Pop would get a good buzz going and then come
nighttime he'd drive us back over. You just can't have fun like that
anymore.Well, tomorrow I'm headed up to Imogene Pass. Next weekend they'll hold the Lunar Cup ski races up there because the snow is still plenty deep but tomorrow will be nice and quiet. If I get a chance I'll post up some nice pic's of the old Tomboy and Liberty Bell Mines and get you a shot of Fort Peabody. If you missed my first in the series, you can catch up here on Fables & Legends of the Great Southwest.
Hope you're all doing well and having a great summer of real estate. Rumor has it the market is picking up in several areas and I surely hope that's true. Talk to you later.
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