Snapshots of Cripple Creek

A few weeks ago I was able to spend a few days in Cripple Creek, and I warned all of you before I left that you would have to wade through a lot of photos from Colorado. Cripple Creek is an old gold mining town that used to be absolutely kicking. According to someone we met there, the Gold Rush was bigger in Cripple Creek than it was in the Yukon and California combined. Which is crazy to me, but hey..they would know better than I. Cripple Creek is now a tiny little town that revolves around tourism in the Summer. Notably there is an old theater, casinos, museums, and a few gold mining mills that were left up from the hey-day. Interestingly enough though, there is a new fully functional gold mining area that many of the people work at, that brings in over a million dollars a day. The mining processes are much more thorough these days, so they even re-mine areas that used to be hot-spots, and are able to extract gold from those areas today.

Not really sure what this building was, whether it was a house or building in between businesses, but I loved how it looked.

The Old Courting House

One of the casinos in the area, that is pretty much empty now, but when Summer hits apparently is quite full

Looking down the main street

While this photo definitely does not match the color scheme of this post, I wanted to put this in here. This is the old Butte Theater, which used to be a massive theater hall, transformed into other businesses (such as a dancing school, furniture store and a few other things) and eventually was restored to a smaller theater (with the lower level being owned by the fire department). We had just kind of wandered in, and one of the owners of the theater was kind enough to give us a solid history of the theater.

The Wes Anderson Police Station

Anyways, if you made it to the end congratulations! I'd love to hear if anyone has been to Cripple Creek and what they thought of it! I thought it was a cool little town, especially since we were there in the off-season and nobody was really around.