Cripple Creek remains a real town.
We drove from Denver, two hours give or take, to “The World’s Greatest Gold Camp,” west of Colorado Springs. We spent a fine day and evening, enjoying a good meal, a comfortable and quiet room in a beautifully restored historic building, and a four-star show in the Butte Opera House.
The sun sparkled off the Sangre de Cristo range in the distance, under a perfect blue sky, warm enough for a hike or a bike ride. At night the cold air snapped under a blanket of stars.
It was a weekend that any mountain town would boast of. The fact that it happened in one of Colorado’s gambling towns made it especially nice.
The weekend we visited, there was even a Christmas parade, featuring black-clad lawmen shooting black powder charges, homemade floats and Joseph leading Mary on a burro. We ate chocolates thrown from firetrucks and chestnuts roasted on an oil-drum fire. Bet you won’t see any of that in Las Vegas.
It’s been 15 years since betting parlors returned to Cripple Creek, Black Hawk and Central City. Some of what happened after 1991 illustrated the Law of Unintended Consequences: If you try to re-create the boomtowns of the Wild West, you might get more wildness than you bargained for.
One of the underused assets of Cripple Creek was the old school, a brick structure built between 1896 and 1903. Most of Cripple Creek burned in 1896 and was rebuilt in brick and stone, accounting for the many handsome buildings along Bennett Avenue, the main drag.
When Gary and Wini Ledford bought the school in 2004, it had been abandoned in 1975, transformed into a hotel, then abandoned again. Ceilings were caving in. It needed tough love.
“We closed at 10 a.m. the day after Valentine’s Day and we were here at 11 with five guys and a roll-off Dumpster,” Gary recalled. He came down the stairs an hour later to discover Wini crying her eyes out in the lobby. “She said, ‘Tell me we didn’t buy this building.”‘
Gary said, “We did it. And it’s done, and people are grateful.”
Elegant inn emerges
The Ledfords have transformed the school into Carr Manor, an elegant inn with 16 rooms and suites, all different. Their tenure as luxury homebuilders shows in the quality of construction, their sense of history in the old photos and documents that line the walls.
The original classroom blackboards remain in the rooms, part guest book, part means of expression. The Ledfords supply chalk, and guests write everything from rave reviews to parts of speech to florid declarations of love, or at least lust.
“I have to edit sometimes,” Gary said, wincing at “I will not look up the teacher’s dress” on the chalkboard in the fitness room.
They’ve preserved the old auditorium as a ballroom and the old gymnasium as a conference center, and are building a small but steadily growing trade as a corporate retreat. Each of the rooms has a television, private bath, wireless Internet, high ceilings and beautiful old windows.
Summer’s the busy time of year in Cripple Creek, but winter offers its share of simple pleasures. The Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine offers tours some weekends, and the Cripple Creek District Museum is open Fridays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
You can still find funky stores, small restaurants and an independent coffee shop in the Aspen Mine Center, a defunct casino reborn as a community center with 25 community organizations and service agencies, plus java and wireless Internet.
Opera House reborn
The Butte Opera House – opened in 1896 in a room over the fire station – also fell on hard times. Its charms hidden under years of junk, it was renovated in 1999 into a 174-seat theater. The melodramas that ran in Cripple Creek for 40 summers had lost their home in 1991 when the Imperial Hotel became a casino. They were relaunched in 2000 at the Butte, which is expanding its professional and community theater activities into a year-round operation.
We saw “A Christmas Wish,” a new production that combines the bones of “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Cripple Creek history, doing justice to both. It has a villain you can hiss (and should).
Oh yeah, and there’s gambling.
Large gaming companies have consolidated many of the small shops and betting parlors along Bennett Avenue, but the Virgin Mule, with 34 slot machines, is still in business and offers free sloppy joes while you’re playing.
Dreaming of a jackpot that would put our children through Harvard, or at least reimburse us for dinner, we took our chances on the dollar slots at one of the big casinos across the street. The building had been David Moffat’s
Bimetallic Bank. That seemed like a good omen to me, but I was wrong. The machine went ding ding and flash flash, and we lost $100 pretty much just like that.
That was the only thing we didn’t enjoy about Cripple Creek.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada. Contact her at lisaeveritt@comcast.net.
The details
Carr Manor, 350 E. Carr Ave., 719-689-3709, carrmanor.com. Winter rates start at $80 for a standard queen room on weekdays, $100 weekends, and go up to $200 per weekday night or $250 per weekend night for the 900-square-foot Gov. Ralph Carr Suite, which boasts a hydrospa and fireplace. No pets, no smoking, no children under 12.
“A Christmas Wish” plays through Dec. 31 at the Butte Opera House, 139 E. Bennett Ave., 719-235-8944, butteoperahouse.com. Shows are Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 1 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. Adult admission $12, seniors $10, children $7.
