Alpine, Colorado: The Chalk Creek Mining Town Next to St. Elmo

Alpine, Colorado is a mining ghost town in Chaffee County, sitting in the Chalk Creek gulch near 14,200-foot Mount Princeton and the Continental Divide. It was founded in the 1870s as part of a mining district that produced gold, silver, and lead from at least fifty active mines. When the last of those mines closed in 1910, Alpine emptied out. In the 1950s and 1960s, summer cabin builders found it again.

01Why Was Alpine Founded?

Alpine emerged in the mid-1870s as a mining supply camp in the Chalk Creek Mining District. The Alpine post office opened on October 26, 1874, during the peak of Colorado's silver rush era. Miners moved into the Chalk Creek gulch to work gold, silver, and lead deposits in the surrounding Sawatch Range mountains.

The Chalk Creek district eventually hosted at least fifty active mines. The largest and most famous was the Mary Murphy Mine, located about four miles from the town of St. Elmo. Alpine served as a support community along the route connecting these mines to railroad transportation.

02The Narrow-Gauge Railroad

The Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad built a narrow-gauge line through Chalk Creek gulch in the early 1880s, passing through Alpine on its way to the engineering marvel known as the Alpine Tunnel — the first railroad tunnel to cross the Continental Divide in the United States. The tunnel opened in 1881 at an elevation of 11,523 feet, an extraordinary feat for nineteenth-century rail engineering.

Alpine's position on this rail line gave it ore shipping, passenger service, and regular supply deliveries during the mining district's active years.

03What Happened to Alpine?

The Chalk Creek Mining District's decline was gradual but complete. Ore bodies played out. Silver prices crashed after the Silver Panic of 1893. The Alpine Tunnel proved too difficult and expensive to maintain — it was abandoned in 1910 due to ventilation problems and rockfall.

The Alpine post office closed on June 30, 1904, marking the community's formal decline before the mines even fully shut down. The Mary Murphy Mine — the last major operation in the district — closed in 1910. With no ore to ship and no railroad to serve, Alpine emptied.

For the next four decades, Alpine and neighboring St. Elmo sat nearly empty in Chalk Creek gulch, visited only by a handful of remaining residents and the occasional prospector hoping for a forgotten vein.

04The Second Life

In the 1950s and 1960s, something changed. Coloradans discovered — or rediscovered — the quiet beauty of Chalk Creek gulch. The high-altitude scenery, the intact nineteenth-century mining buildings, the access to hiking and fishing: all of it appealed to post-war summer cabin builders. New construction went up alongside the decaying original structures.

Alpine's identity split. It became simultaneously a ghost town (to visitors and historians) and a seasonal mountain community (to the summer cabin owners).

05Can You Visit Alpine Today?

Yes. Alpine is accessible via Chalk Creek Road from Nathrop, about 14 miles south of Buena Vista. The road continues past Alpine to St. Elmo, which receives most visitor attention. Alpine itself is quieter — a mix of original mining-era structures and summer cabins scattered along Chalk Creek.

Visitors to St. Elmo should make a point of continuing up the road to Alpine, which offers a more muted and lived-in ghost town experience than the tourist-focused St. Elmo townsite.

06What Remains of Alpine Today

Alpine today is a hybrid: some original nineteenth-century cabins and mining-era structures, mixed with mid-twentieth-century summer cabins built on or near old townsite lots. The setting — Chalk Creek gulch below Mount Princeton in the Sawatch Range — remains one of the most dramatic mountain landscapes in Colorado's Collegiate Peaks region.