Lead King Basin

A jeep tour company in Marble offers a five-hour jeep tour into the White River National Forest. Called the Lead King Basin Tour, it's a dirt 4X4 road that leaves just past Beaver Lake in Marble and circles Sheep Mountain.

The highlights, besides the incredible panoramic views, are Coors Falls and the ghost town of Crystal City, once a mining town of just about every mineral except gold.

The route is some 12 miles, much of it over rocky and narrow cliff-hanging roads.

The town of Crystal, sometimes called Crystal City, had its heyday in the 1880s when copper, silver, lead and zinc were being mined from the nearby mountains. It's long been deserted save one soul who spends her summers here. When the jeep tour or other four-wheelers come through, she'll walk across the street and open the dimly-lit store that sells next to nothing. If anyone happens to venture in, she'll be sitting there in the corner and will ask them to sign the visitor's roster. When I spoke with her she told me how she liked it up here by herself and hated it when she had to go into town for supplies.

In front of the black jeep you can barely see a gray-colored car, SUV style. It so happened the day before that a lady, relying on her GPS, attempted the road to Crystal from Marble. She got stuck, probably on large rocks, spent the night in her car and was happened upon by a couple in the red four-wheeler. They notified a rescue car (the black jeep) who took the shaken lady back into Marble. This was around 3 in the afternoon of her second day. Her car, which was in pretty bad shape, had to be towed in.

I've included this page in the Roaring Fork Valley region of Colorado. If you'd like to see more of this spectacular area, please click here for more photos.

If you'd like to see other regions of Colorado, you can return to the Colorado home page.

Or, you may wish to visit a location below.

Please visit some of my other travel locations. Feel free to email me if you have questions or comments.

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