Leadville Colorado Travel Guide- 10 Things You Need to Know

Welcome to Leadville, Colorado. This is the highest city in the United States at over 10,000 feet above sea level. My name is Matt. My wife Cheryl is behind the camera. This is our first time in this city of Leadville here, and so we're going to take you around and show you some things to do in the city and tell you about some things that we learned. Leadville, Colorado is located in the heart of Colorado's Rocky Mountains. In fact, it is the highest city in the United States at an elevation of 10,158 feet. Leadville was established in the Silver Rush of the 1800s and has many charming Victorian buildings from the era. It's still a mining town today, but they are working on attracting tourists with fun adventure activities and a charming Main Street. It's only a few hours away from Denver and would most likely be visited in conjunction with other Colorado mountain towns such as Breckenridge, Aspen, and Vail. If you're interested in visiting these places, we'll explain the best way to do this near the end of this video. Like a lot of Colorado towns, Leadville was a mining town way up here in the mountains. At one point, it was like the richest city in Colorado or one of them, and they had quite a bit of population here. Kind of reflected in the buildings that you'll see along Main Street, a lot of them are really fancy Victorian style type buildings. Pretty cool actually just to walk up and down and see. Now we stopped at the Visitor's Center and my recommendation here is not to do the historical walking tour. It's been kind of boring here, but all you need to do is just walk up and down Main Street. The buildings are cool. The stories aren't all that cool, but the buildings are really cool. Some of them are purple. You can see this one behind me here, the Tabor Opera House. That's the big name you need to know in Leadville is that Horace Tabor kind of built this whole city and just had a ton of money, had kind of a scandalous little relationship with his second wife, a divorce, and it was kind of a big thing back in the day. Her name was Baby Doe. Anyway, it is a really kind of a cool historic town to just walk up and down and check out the shops. We've been having a little competition to see who can find the most interesting things, so we just went into an antique shop and looked for some interesting stuff in there. But anyway, it is definitely worth just spending a little bit of time walking up and down Main Be prepared for nosebleeds. I mentioned earlier Leadville is the highest city in the United States, over 10,000 feet. It's really kind of mind-blowing actually how high it is, but it doesn't really feel like you're on top of the world when you're here because Leadville is located in a valley here. You can see those mountains behind me here. A lot of these mountains surrounding Leadville are 14ers. They're over 14,000 feet high above sea level. And so the tallest mountains in Colorado are right here, Mount Elbert and Mount Massive. And so when you're here, it doesn't necessarily feel like you're just up on top of the world, although you really are. And you can maybe feel it a little bit as you walk around. Even me, me and Cheryl, we live in the Rockies in Utah and we're used to the elevation, but even way up here, this is more than twice as high as where we live. I still feel just a little bit of that thin air as we walk around. Like a lot of other towns, the mines pretty much eventually dried up and they moved on. Now a lot of towns went into ghost town status, but others transitioned into skiing. So some of the more famous towns you know in Colorado like Aspen and Breckenridge, those are mining towns that transitioned into skiing. Leadville did not do that. I don't think there's a ski resort around here, at least that's not its main industry. But there are still some recreational opportunities here. So around the entire town is something called the Mineral Belt Trail and it's a really popular biking trail today. We thought about doing that trail because it does get you to some really beautiful views of the area, but instead we opted for the Top of the Rockies Zipline Tour. That was absolutely fantastic. We'll cover that in just a minute. But there's also plenty of other things like ATVing, snowmobiling in the winter, boating. I went out to Turquoise Lake today, that was a really beautiful lake. So there are plenty of recreational opportunities around here and while you're doing that, a lot of them you get to learn about the mining history here. Right behind me is the Top of the Rockies Zipline Tour. What it is is a zipline course and how it works is they take guests in a big army type vehicle up to the top of the mountain and then across six different ziplines you make your way down. We just finished this as our family, so both Matt and I and our four kids and we loved it. In fact, our kids say it was pretty much their favorite thing that we've done on our trip so far. A couple of them said Glenwood Caverns was a little funner, but this was amazing. I was surprised at how long these ziplines are and it was really fun because a lot of them are double ziplines so you can have a partner and go at the same time and race. I felt like the guides were wonderful, they were funny, they were super professional. Which one's this? Grandma's house. Why? I don't remember. It's short and sweet. Short and sweet. Over the river and through the woods. And they got us through quickly, we weren't waiting in a big line. I think they kind of max their groups out at 30 at a time. We probably had about 18 in ours and so our tour only took an hour and a half, but it was awesome. Oh my gosh, we were going over rivers, looking at the canyons. We really, really enjoyed it. If you're thinking about going for yourself, it costs about $125 for adult and the weight limits are like $60 to $250, so just be thinking about that. We booked ours in advance, it seemed like they had a few more openings if you wanted to do a last minute. But zip lines are something common to do in Colorado, just like a lot of other activities like gondolas and mountain coasters. But if you're on a trip to Colorado, this is the one I've tried and we loved it. As we've spent the afternoon in this town of Leadville, I've noticed just a little bit about the personality of this town. One word I would use to describe it is very chill. It's just kind of a place you meander, you mosey. Even our zip line tour people were pretty laid back, like they were fun, but they were laid back. And one thing you can do as you kind of meander around town is check out some of these antique shops. I've noticed three of them. So I think that if you like antiques, this would be a great town for you. Up next is the incredible Independence Pass Scenic Drive. This road travels 32 miles connecting Aspen to Leadville. On the way you'll pass incredible cascades, lush valleys full of aspen trees, and the interesting Independence Ghost Town, so named because gold was found here on July 4th. The road then climbs the mountain wall in a similar manner to the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park. At the summit, you'll be above the tree line where you can wander among the tundra to some incredible views of the surrounding mountain peaks and valleys. Here you'll be over 12,000 feet above sea level. The road then descends into the historic and cute little village of Twin Lakes, eventually reaching Leadville. If you're into recreation, one thing you can do is this Mineral Belt Trail. This is about 14 miles, it goes kind of behind the city. There's little placards along the way that tell some of the history about their mining. This city has done silver, zinc, and lead. And it's really interesting as you go through here because you can kind of see different colors in the rocks where they've mined, and then just some old remnants of mines of the past. I think my kids and I, we've had a good time walking along this, but several people prefer to bike this, and in fact we had thought about doing this, and so I do know that you can rent a bike to come here, and it can be $30 to $40, or you can even get e-bikes, and that's around $70 for about half a day. If you use an e-bike, this trail would take about two hours. If you don't use an e-bike, about four. But we're just kind of walking along, and we feel like we've gotten a good taste of the history of Leadville. I'm standing on the balcony here at the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum. You can see Leadville behind me here. The museum, I've just gotten into the museum and checked that out for the last hour or so, and Leadville, that's one thing to know about Leadville is that it's a city of museums. This little town has eight museums that you can go to, which is kind of crazy. They brag that they have the most museums per capita anywhere in Colorado, which is kind of a funny, funny brag. I can't say that the museum was all that interesting, unless you're really into mining history, but one thing I did learn is that they still mine here at a place called the Climax Mine. The Climax Mine is one of the main employers around here, and what they mine is a mineral called molybdenum or something like that. It looks like molybenum or something. They just call it moly. It's a mineral that they just call moly, and apparently it's used in just a ton of things that we use on an everyday basis, and the mine here called the Climax Mine has been the most productive moly mine in the world, apparently. Next up is the Leadville Train. So many people are into trains, so we thought we would talk about this today. This train goes on a couple of runs every day in Leadville, and it goes through the forest sort of in a route similar to the road through this town goes through also. It's about an hour and a half trip, and our family has been on several train rides in the past, and we're going to be going on a train ride on this trip because many of the mountain towns in Colorado offer train rides, but we have chosen to go on the Georgetown Railroad just because it was less expensive, it was a little shorter, and it seemed like a better fit for our family. But after talking to some people in town, they love their Leadville train, and maybe you would too. If you'd like to visit Leadville or the other cities nearby, the good news is we have a travel guide which will provide you a step-by-step itinerary for seeing the best of Colorado's mountain towns in the top of the Rockies. Check out the description for the link.