Rico and the railroad: why a mountain town sits in Dolores County

If you look at Dolores County on a map, the two towns sit far apart for a reason. Dove Creek is out on the dry farming country in the west. Rico is tucked into the mountains in the east. That split comes from history.

Rico began as a mining town. In the late 1800s, silver strikes in these mountains drew prospectors, and a town grew up fast in the high valley. To move ore and supplies, a narrow-gauge railroad, the Rio Grande Southern, was pushed through the rugged country and over Lizard Head Pass, tying Rico into the wider mining region around Telluride and Durango. When silver crashed in the 1890s, the boom faded, but the town and the route it sat on remained.

Knowing this helps the modern map make sense. The reason a small mountain town exists where it does, and the reason a scenic highway and old rail grades thread the same passes today, is that people once needed to get silver out. The land identity here was shaped by mining and the railroad as much as by farming.

For the documented history of Rico and the Rio Grande Southern, see History Colorado and the Colorado Encyclopedia.