The air smells of burning leaves and burning wallets. The town feels like two models--a miniature--with a newer model built inside an antique, like the elaborate workings of a Lionel train master who devotes their basement to a web of railroad tracks and miniature shacks, with fake moss creeping up the side of a paper machete mountain ridge and a town built around a train depot.
It’s all one big attempt to refurbish past prosperity and find some sense of nostalgia. Houses built by withering sticks and tin siding climb outward from the main road and the faint sound of a stout, aged woman losing her last nickels at the slots echoes through the foothills of the mountains that I am not prepared to pass. This used to be a mining town, and in that time it was known as the Richest Square Mile on Earth; now it favors a more conventional form of gambling. Casinos line the main road, though they forgo the bright lights and sounds of the desert oasis of Vegas in favor of a more rustic approach. A mile and a half ago I passed through the more extroverted and subsequently more successful casino haven Black Hawk; this town lives in its shadow.
Both cities bloomed at their inception during the mining rush of the late 1850’s, bringing well over ten thousand eager, foolish gold-seekers--all gamblers in their own right. Their population retreated ever since, never returning to the glory they knew at birth and currently hovers around a collective 600 today. They continue to attract gamblers of a different kind and accept the donations of travelling drunks and honeymooners on their way to the more luxurious Vail.
Dostal Alley, Easy Street and Famous Bonanza--these are products of an underwhelming experiment of the early 90’s, when Colorado attempted to reinvent the town as a caricature of its former self, forbidding people from building houses of any style other than the traditional brick houses of its mining days and create a new angle on chance that drew greedy men there in the first place.
I stop for a soda at Annie Oakley’s Emporium, but I’m a quarter short. Oh well, I could always get a few Owl Cigars, whose building reads ‘still only 5 cents’ in my rearview mirror as I leave the city, soon to be forgotten amongst the peaks and valleys of the jagged, rocky mountains. 