After meeting the man who’d earlier laid out the claim at the top of today’s Little Nell where the first silver ore outcroppings were discovered, Staats eyed straight across to Smuggler where the same lime and silver had surfaced. By his reckoning, rich claims should be found in Hunter Creek.
Author Archives: Tim Cooney
Tim Cooney is an Aspen freelance writer and former ski patroller. Among others, the Aspen Daily News, The Aspen Times, The Avalanche Review, Aspen Sojourner, Ski and Powder Magazine have published his work. His Aspen Journalism story “Taming the Snow Beast” won 2018 best story/picture combination from Colorado Press Association. He has a bachelor’s degree in government and philosophy from University of Denver.
Posted inHistory
Town of Ruedi submerged by reservoir, but not by history
The Fry-Ark grew out of post-World War II optimism when government championed big projects and environmentalism was a seedling.
Posted inHistory, Water
Big bore in hard times
Aspen locals in 1930 welcomed the work on a big dam-and-tunnel project on Independence Pass, but the community grew to miss the water in the river.
Posted inHistory
Aspen’s rich history of befouling the Fork
As Aspen evolved from a bucolic high-mountain meadow to an industrial city, pollution began to flow directly into the Roaring Fork River and its tributaries.
Posted inHistory
Dewatering the Smuggler Mountain mines
The object of multiple dives between October 1910 and January 1911 into the debris-clogged mine was to rebuild the pump at the bottom of the Free Silver shaft on the 12th level.
Posted inHistory
Taming the snow beast
34 years ago on March 31, a monumental avalanche wrote a tragic chapter in Aspen history
Posted inHistory
Pitkin’s boastful gulch
The first prospectors up Lincoln Creek in the early 1880s faced avalanches, unstable explosives, cave-ins, and odyssey-like distances to marginal medical care.