Idaho Springs: The Water Beneath the Gold

A self-guided audio walk through Idaho Springs, Colorado, where the gold rush in the Rockies took off, following the water that made the town and kept costing it. Start where Chicago Creek meets Clear Creek and George Jackson, alone in the snow in January 1859, found his nugget in the ninth cup of thawed gravel. Then walk Miner Street: the 1878 hose house and the Carnegie library that grew out of the women’s clubs, the house with two front doors that a widow hoped would never become a tavern, the Mining Exchange and the summer of 1903, when a crowd marched striking miners out of town, and the schoolhouse the town moved and defended in the Colorado Supreme Court. Along the Clear Creek Greenway come Charlie Tayler’s waterwheel below Bridal Veil Falls and the foot of Soda Creek Road, where hot water drove a father and son out of their mine shaft and a doctor turned it into a bath business. The walk ends below the Argo Mill, at the mouth of the tunnel built to drain the mines, where a flood killed four men in 1943 and where the water is still treated today. Everything is told from public sidewalks and the public Greenway; the museums, the hot springs and the Argo Mill are seen from outside only, and no tickets are sold or bundled.

The stops

1. The Ninth Cup
2. Fire Carts and Books
3. Two Doors on Miner Street
4. The Exchange and the Summer of 1903
5. A Schoolhouse on the Move
6. The Wheel by the Falls
7. The Shaft That Filled with Hot Water
8. The Water That Never Stopped

Finding the start

Start on the Clear Creek Greenway footbridge beside the Highway 103 bridge, just south of Interstate 70 exit 240 at the west end of Idaho Springs: from Miner Street, walk south on the 13th Avenue (Highway 103) sidewalk under the interstate, about 300 meters.

Terrain and access

About 2.5 kilometers, step-free and nearly level, on paved sidewalks and the paved Clear Creek Greenway with two footbridges. Getting to the start and leaving it, you cross the Interstate 70 on- and off-ramps beside Highway 103: use the signals. Other street crossings are on Miner Street at 14th, 15th and 17th Avenues and at the busy junction of Miner Street, Colorado Boulevard and Soda Creek Road. The last stretch drops gently from Colorado Boulevard to a footbridge (not yet checked on foot). Interstate 70 runs beside the Greenway, so it is noisy there. Do not walk up Soda Creek Road (no sidewalk under the interstate) and stay off the creek banks. The walk is at about 2,300 meters above sea level: take it slowly and carry water. It ends below the Argo Mill, about 15 minutes’ walk east of downtown.

Tickets

Nothing on the route needs a ticket; the museums, the hot springs and the Argo Mill are seen from outside only.

Keep going

• Georgetown: The Silver Queen’s Survivors

What you get

• An email from [email protected] with a link and an access code.
• Use it on your phone or tablet in an up-to-date web browser, no app store needed. There is no account to set up before you start.
• Download it on Wi-Fi before you go. After that it works offline: audio, text, map and pictures.
• Your booking includes 2 phones, so two of you can follow along, each on your own. Extra phones are $2.95 each, or a group can share one phone on its speaker.
• Play, pause and replay every part, skip back and ahead, or change the playback speed. Keep the screen on or tap play at each stop.

How it was made

Every fact in the narration is checked against a cited source, and legends are told as legends. The narration is written from that research. How our tours are made.

Image credits

• Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Gates Frontiers Fund Colorado Collection, Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress (public domain)
• Photo: Nicole Byrd / James St. John, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (license)
• Photo: Xnatedawgx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (license)
• Photo: Erie Bard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (license)
• Photo: Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (license)