Pitkin Days

At eight o’clock on the last Saturday in July, runners and walkers line up in front of the Silver Plume General Store at Ninth and State streets in Pitkin. The Alpine Run/Walk is a timed course of two miles or five. Anyone may enter, there is no fee, and the Gunnison Country Times tells entrants to arrive early to register. Every finisher receives a certificate. First place takes a “Golden” Railroad Spike.

Pitkin lies on the old D & S P Railroad line, twenty-eight miles northeast of Gunnison on Quartz Creek. The creek forms where the North, South and Middle Fox Creeks join, and it runs through the town. The town occupies an alpine meadow about a mile long and a quarter mile wide. The town’s history page gives the elevation as 9,242 feet, and Wikipedia gives 9,229. The 2020 census counted 72 residents. The Pitkin Historical and Community Association, which puts on the day, calls it Pitkin Day, and the Gunnison paper calls it Pitkin Days. On that Saturday, in the association’s words, “All the Quartz Creek Valley folks come together as well as friends and family who are visiting.”

From the Silver Plume to the Stumbling Moose

In 2026 the day fell on July 25, and the Times printed the schedule hour by hour. At nine, children up to 14 years old fished in a contest at the Kids’ Fishing Pond just north of town. At 10:30 the games began at the Community Center, open to both children and adults. The association lists them as a basketball free throw contest followed by cornhole, seed spitting and plunger toss. The Pitkin Museum opened its doors for the morning, and the prizes for the afternoon benefit drawing sat out for preview until noon.

At noon there was fried chicken “and all the fixings” at the Newcomb Community Center on State Street. The drawing came at 1:30, and the association’s own page calls it the “draffle.” At three the egg toss and balloon toss began, followed by ice cream at the pavilion. A duck race at the Stumbling Moose at four closed out the afternoon. The exact program changes from year to year and is posted on the town bulletin boards and the association’s Facebook page.

Popcorn for the villain

The evenings belong to the melodrama, staged in the historical Town Hall on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the Pitkin Day weekend. Local thespians, the association writes, “enjoy acting the roles of the beautiful heroine, hero, and other lusty and rusty characters.” The audience takes part. It boos and throws popcorn at the villain, oohs and ahhs, and lets the actors know it is enjoying the evening.

In 2026 the Terrible Mountain Gallery added a free evening of its own to the weekend. It listed a “Miners Mascarade” for July 25 from 6 to 9 p.m. under the heading Pitkin Days, with the details marked “Coming Soon!”

The schoolhouse on Main Street

The Times describes the day’s purpose as fun in support of the association’s mission “to keep alive the history of Pitkin.” The association also holds pancake breakfasts and a monthly potluck that doubles as its business meeting. Its fundraising pays for the Pitkin Historical Museum and the Newcomb Community Center. Gary Danhof served as president for the 2024–2025 term.

The museum occupies the schoolhouse on Main Street, which taught the first through eighth grades until the early 1960s. Its sections cover the town’s history, mining, logging and the railroad, along with items from the years the school was in use. Association members volunteer to keep it open many days of the summer. An open sign goes out by the street when it is open, and there is no charge, though donations are welcome. Two of the town’s original buildings have been moved onto the schoolhouse grounds. One is an old town hall with voting results written on its walls. The other is an old home donated by Charlie Goldberg and furnished with historical pieces. A playground run by the town stands beside the museum, and the association’s pavilion sits between the museum and the community center. The center was begun with a gift from Gale Richardson in memory of her parents and finished with donations from others.

Quartzville, 1879

The association says most of what it tells about the town’s founding comes from Freeda Brown’s Pitkin Past Times (1879–1884), published in 1981 and now out of print. By that account, Frank Curtiss, George P. Chiles and Wayne Scott founded the camp in early 1879 under the name Quartzville. The association’s history calls it Colorado’s first mining camp west of the Continental Divide. Wikipedia says only that it “is said to be.” By March 1, 1879, the three founders, joined by Zeb Watson and W. W. Wolfe, were laying the foundation of the camp’s first building. It was a small log cabin on Main Street, across from the spot where the town paper, the Pitkin Independent, would begin in July 1880.

The association’s history says the town was incorporated on August 11, 1879, and renamed that day for Governor Frederick W. Pitkin. Wikipedia, citing the Colorado State Archives, dates the incorporation to April 5, 1880. The governor’s story, as the history page tells it, began in Connecticut and continued in Milwaukee, where he became a prominent attorney until his health failed. After a trip to Europe in 1873 he was so ill that his friends expected him to die. His wife insisted he try “the remedy of the West.” The family settled in Colorado, lived rough among the mining camps, and he recovered and went on to serve two terms as governor. In 1881 he arrived in his namesake camp by stage by way of Woodstock, with his wife and their children, Robert and Florence. The family stayed a week at the Pitkin House before going on to Ouray.

The first recorded lots were bought by J. M. Hill on December 13, 1879. In July 1882 the town auctioned the lots it owned at $1 to $5 apiece, 59 lots in all for $149.65. The governor bought lots 7, 8, 9 and 10 in Block 41 for $5 each. Deeds to town lots were written on scraps of paper and signed by the landowner, with the lot and block numbers clearly stated. The history page says many of them still exist.

Veins that played out at a hundred feet

Six mines worked through the winter of 1879. More than thirty worked through the winter of 1880. The ores were mainly iron, lead, gold, silver and copper, and among the steady producers were the Cleopatra, Fairview, Tycoon, Nest Egg, Swiss Bill and Silver Islet. Some specimens from them assayed at $18,000 a ton. The telegraph arrived in September 1880 and was housed in the Pitkin House Hotel. The first school opened that year as a private school, with 39 students in eight grades meeting in a two-story building on the present school site. On November 17, 1880, the first covered stage rolled in from Gunnison, and the 1880 census counted 1,891 people.

On March 1, 1881, J. L. Sanderson & Company began running stages along the toll road from Gunnison through Pitkin, up Middle Quartz to Woodstock and over Williams Pass to Hancock. The company added two new six-horse Concord coaches for the traffic. By July 1881 newcomers were arriving at 25 a day. After passengers complained that they could not get off where they wished, the company moved the departure for Alpine from three in the morning to nine. The fare for the 28 miles from Gunnison was four dollars. By June 1882 the town had more than 60 business houses, 300 to 400 residences with fewer than a dozen empty, and a population of over 1,000.

That summer the veins began to fail. Ore that was rich near the surface ran out at 75 to 100 feet down and did not justify further work. By the spring of 1883 Pitkin had lost half its people. Three major fires and three epidemics followed in the late 1880s. A silver revival in 1891 and 1892 ended with the panic of 1893. The Roosevelt Mine opened three miles below town in 1907 and ran into the 1930s, until low-grade ore and controversy stopped it. Timber and the fish hatchery kept the town going through the 1920s and 1930s. The Depression brought the population below 100, and the history page says it has stayed there. In the winter of 1997–1998, Pitkin had 80 year-round residents, and summer raised the count to between 200 and 300.