Leadville
At 10,152 Feet, The Highest Incorporated City In The United States. Its Silver Boom Centre Is One Of The Largest National Historic Landmark Districts In The Country, Covering Around Seventy Blocks. · Leadville, Colorado
Leadville is the highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152 feet, and for about fifteen years it was one of the richest places on earth. Silver was found in 1877 and within three years there were thirty thousand people here, a hundred and twenty saloons and an opera house that opened in a hundred days. Horace Tabor made a fortune, left his wife for Baby Doe, lost everything in the crash of 1893 and died telling her to hold on to the Matchless Mine; she lived in a cabin beside it for thirty-six years and froze to death there in 1935. Doc Holliday fought his last gunfight on Harrison Avenue. Molly Brown lived here before the Titanic. What is left is around seventy blocks of National Historic Landmark district at two miles above the sea, with Mount Elbert - the highest point in Colorado - on the skyline. It also has the cheapest beds of any historic mountain town in the state by a wide margin, which is the practical reason to stay rather than pass through.
Harrison Avenue, Leadville, Colorado, 80461, United States
A year-round town of around 2,600 people. The museums and the tourist railroad are largely seasonal, running roughly May to October, with the Tabor Opera House and the National Mining Hall of Fame keeping limited winter hours. THE ALTITUDE IS THE OPERATING CONSTRAINT: at 10,152 feet, visitors arriving from low elevation are commonly affected. Independence Pass, the scenic road west to Aspen, is CLOSED ALL WINTER, typically from November to late May. The Leadville Trail 100 races fill the town in August.