For longtime followers of HeidiTown, this isn’t new information: Ryan and I like history. A lot. He tends to like the nuts and bolts while I like the overall story. That makes us a good team. Our love of history has inspired road trips to the Dust Bowl area and cattle trails that led us to Dodge City, Kansas, and McCook, Nebraska.
Teller County was a good choice for exploration. We ended up in the area because I wanted to go somewhere new for my birthday weekend. We hadn’t been to the county for nearly a decade and had never stayed in Victor (in the past, we stayed in Cripple Creek).
While history is all about mining, mining is also part of the present-day story. The largest gold mining company in the world operates in Victor and it owns quite a lot of the area. Last year, Newmont Company’s revenue was more than 11 billion dollars (that’s BILLION), which was down from the previous year. I wish I owned gold mines!
In case you’re curious, Newmont is a Colorado company headquartered in Denver. Employing 21,700 worldwide, around a thousand in Colorado, the company owns mines around the world.
Now that you’ve learned something today I’ll get on with our trip.
Our Airbnb, located in the tiny town of Victor, Colorado, has one bedroom, one bathroom, a roomy living room, and a charming little kitchen. Plus, there is a balcony. I have only stayed at a handful of Airbnbs through the years, and this one is the poster child for what I think an Airbnb should be.
At $340 for two nights, it is affordable, especially here in Colorado. Plus, it was dog-friendly, which was key. I’d decided I wanted Fritzi along for my birthday celebration.
Not only did it have everything we needed like a toaster, coffee maker, and coffee, but the apartment had things we didn’t know we needed like snacks and a pizza in the freezer. I wrote earlier that Victor is a tiny town, and that’s not an exaggeration. There are less than 400 residents, and dining isn’t easy as there is one bakery, one bar, and one pizza joint. That’s it.
While Cripple Creek is only nine minutes away, having snacks and pizza in the freezer is smart. Also, it’s super nice. There were even milk bones, a dog bed, dog bowls, and poop bags (obviously, the owners have dogs).
The best part of staying in Victor instead of Cripple Creek, for me, is that Victor isn’t a gambling town. I like going to Las Vegas once every five years, but I didn’t feel like staying in a gambling town for my birthday.
Plus, instead of being surrounded by the incessant noise of slot machines, in Victor one is surrounded by nature and history. Buildings feature fancy scrollwork, each prettier than the next, ruins of old mines on the surrounding hills, and crumbling rock ruins, like the Gold Coin Mine directly behind the Page Building, home to our Airbnb. By the way, the Page Building is home to two short-term rental units.
In Victor, a person is surrounded by a living archive of the way it all used to be.
One morning, we headed to the Vindicator Trail. Circular it leads the walker by mine after mine. At its height, Victor was a town of 17,000, and the surrounding area was home to more than 600 mines. The rumor is that a few locals still work mines on their land, but Newmont is the only big game in town.
On the Vindicator Trail, we passed so many mines! It was mind-boggling. Ryan stopped to read every educational sign, of which there were many. Devoid of any other humans, Fritzi enjoyed a little off-leash time.
Once again, I was reminded that mining in the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s was the worst job. Whether mining coal or gold, it involves grubby hours spent underground and awful bosses. The men who ran these mines were tyrants, just read the signs. There were even bombing incidents!
More concerned with the scenery than each mine’s history, I took photos while Ryan read signs. We were visiting little after peak color in this area, but there were still many golden aspens (and a lot of naked ones too). The area would be spectacular in peak color.
I made breakfast each morning in our apartment, and the only meal we ate out in Victor was lunch at the Gold Camp Bakery. We split the half loaf sandwich and it was plenty of food. At $13 it included a bag of chips and soda. The full local sandwich, $23, could easily feed a family of four. So, lunch was a very good deal. I highly recommend this place, and so does everyone else. I was told about it by two HeidiTown readers and everyone in Victor.
They have amazing-looking cakes and pastries in the case and get rave reviews on their German breakfast. We bought some oatmeal cookies. The pot pie ($7.50) would be ideal to buy and take to the apartment for a meal. We’ll do that next time we’re in town, and we might be back this winter. The ice castles are now in Cripple Creek.
Do not miss the Victor Trading Company next to the bakery. They make brooms (a nearly lost craft), and the shop is full of fun and interesting things to buy. The shop is also home to Milo. This green-eyed tabby cat is not for sale, but he enjoys pets and has his own line of greeting cards and fridge magnets, that I happily bought.
We did venture into Cripple Creek on a Saturday night for dinner, and Sunday to find the Broncos game on television. A quiet place in October, it’s not nearly as bustling as Central City or Black Hawk (Colorado’s two other gambling towns, also former mining towns). Of course, those two towns are less than an hour from Denver, giving them a much bigger target market. Cripple Creek is just over an hour from Colorado Springs.
It’s difficult to find a restaurant that’s not associated with a casino in Cripple Creek, but we managed to find two. First, The Creek is comfy and offers comfort food like mac ‘n’ cheese and green chile on the menu. With only two staff members, including our bartender, surprisingly they were holding it together pretty well and were super friendly. The one-beer-each yummy dinner set us back $80 (including tip).
The next day, we found another non-gambling restaurant in Cripple Creek to watch the Broncos game. Called The District Kitchen & Saloon, we bellied up to the bar. Light and bright, with an amusing bartender who kept our drinks full, a good number of taps and televisions, and the sound on for the game, we were happy. It’s fairly new. We were impressed with everything including prices and would return in a heartbeat.
Lastly, I must make note of our visit to Rita the Rock Planter. Victor is home to this Thomas Dambo troll. There is a trail from town out Rita, but consider this a warning that it’s a lot of uphill, and the elevation is nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. We drove, and so did everyone else! This was the busiest place we visited in Teller County, including Cripple Creek.
It’s worth “hiking” the quarter of a mile to see Rita. After avoiding ankle-twisting rocks and tourists on the trail, we dutifully waited our turn to take a photo with Rita. The view of the area, which includes a vista of Cripple Creek in the far distance, is worth the scads of tourists who descend upon this tourist destination.
All in all, it was a successful birthday weekend. We explored a new area and even managed to say hello to the donkeys, something we hadn’t done on a previous visit.
Victor isn’t a place where you’ll find raging nightlife, and in fact, you’ll find zero nightlife unless you count the foxes and coyotes that run the streets after dark. However, Victor is peaceful and boasts tons of Colorado history.
We liked Victor and enjoyed our Airbnb. We liked it enough that we’re already considering a return trip, and that’s really saying something! By the way, we did venture into the museum in Victor. We didn’t have time to take a tour before the Broncos game, but we did buy a book about the area by Mabel Barbee Lee.
