Salida Escape

Last week my wife and I were in Salida, Colorado, with side trips to the mountains, to Buena Vista, another town a half an hour up the road, and to Victor, a town a few miles down the road from Cripple Creek. My photography focused mostly on the architecture of the places we visited. But yes, nature was beautiful too. This is the Boss Lake Reservoir, which we passed on a hike up to Hunt Lake.

Both Salida and Buena Vista are tourist towns, especially the latter. Salida is more chill and less crowded. Both have a lot of beat up old, small homes, reflecting the blue-collar origins of the towns. And in both cases, some of those homes and properties are decorated with fun, counter-cultural sensibility. I’ll do a blogpost on homes later. This post focuses more on the business districts.

Here are two from Salida. The first is a building that is a work of art in itself, with newer and worn out signs. The second is an alleyway, a feature of many older towns in Colorado. I liked how the alleyway leads you to the hill with the “S” for Salida.

The next bunch are from Victor, a “ghost-town-ish” town near Cripple Creek. The latter was a legendary mining town with a violent labor history. Today it is a built-over tourist trap, with casinos replacing the gold mines as the inspiration for getting rich quickly. In Victor, you can see glorious architecture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It has a number of labor union buildings and several lodge buildings. (By “lodge,” I don’t mean places to live, I mean lodges as in Freemasons. Many lodges were related to professions like, well, masons, or engineers and miners.)

One is an old Western Federation of Miners building; the WFM was a radical labor union that played a major role in the Colorado labor wars. The second image is this group has an example of a lodge (the building with the triangle features in the roof line).

Here’s a few glorious old buildings, including the Victor Hotel, which still takes guests. As you can see from other images, however, many of the old buildings are empty; where there were businesses, most were closed. There was an excellent bakery, however, that was open. The laundromat was open too, as was an auto repair business.

The last two images are again from Salida, but in the early evening, once the lights were on for the evening and the waning sun was giving the sky orange-red hues.

It’s good to be home, sleeping in my own bed; even restaurants start to get tiresome for me, after a week or more of them. But the weather, scenery, and ambiance in Salida and nearby Colorado towns made for a lovely vacation. My next blogpost will focus on homes in Salida and Buena Vista.