Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Old Railroad Tunnels through Ute Pass

My all time favorite class in high school was Colorado history. Problem is, there is so much there that it would take several years to encompass it all, especially the mining periods. Thanks for the pictures.

I can almost hear the rattlesnakes in those tunnels.

The railway that went up Gold Camp Road was narrow gauge, it was nicknamed ‘the short line.’ The railway that went up Phantom Canyon from Florence was narrow gauge too. But this one, the Colorado Midland...and the Midland Terminal...was standard gauge. Much of present Hwy. 67 between Divide and Cripple Creek runs along the old Midland Terminal spur between Divide and the mining district. There is a former wood-shored Midland Terminal tunnel that was once used as a one-lane highway tunnel on CO 67 until the 1990’s when part of it collapsed. It was bypassed with a new cut and the old tunnel is still there. You can look inside of it and still see the shoring on the inside. Access has been closed with a grille though. It’s at the trailhead for Pancake Rocks on CO 67.

The line that ran over the Gold Camp was also Standard gauge.

Before our last snowstorm I found some old railroad tunnels up above Manitou Springs in the mountains through which the Colorado Midland used to run through Ute Pass. I had an idea where they were, I just had to find a way to get up in there. These tunnels were blasted out in the 1880’s. The Colorado Midland was the first standard gauge railroad built over the continental divide in the state. Later on when gold was discovered in Cripple Creek and Victor, they built the Midland Terminal Railway which was a standard gauge spur from Divide that ran on into the mining district at Cripple Creek and Victor. The old shop for the Colorado Midland is still standing on Hwy. 24 at 21st Street in Colorado Springs. It’s now the Ghost Town Museum. And the old roundhouse building that housed engines, and where they’d turn them around so they could head back up through Ute Pass again, is still standing at Hwy. 24 at 21st Street a little southeast of the old shop. The ore processing mill was at Old Colorado City and the smokestack from that old mill is still standing by a housing development called Gold Hill Mesa, which is built on top of about 14 million tons of processed ore from the gold mines up in the above mentioned mining district. These trains used to run from the mill, up through these tunnels in Ute Pass, to the mines, and haul the ore from the mines back down to the mill at Old Colorado City for processing. Lotta history, and a helluva bunch of hard work involved.

When they abandoned the railroads, they took up the tracks. This country is honeycombed with old mines. Literally thousands of miles of shafts, slopes, tunnels, cross cuts, drifts, stopes, and chutes. I have been in many; many are flat-out dangerous; many...due to erosion, collapse, and the passage of time...have an opening that is only a foot or so across, and from top to bottom. In a few more years they’ll be gone. Some of those big mines up in the mining district at Cripple Creek and Victor had enclosed headframes so they could continue working 24/7/365 in inclement weather at 10,000 feet elevation.

Looks like a good place to dump a body