Cripple Creek
Sorry about my lack of pictures yesterday, the Internet where I was was almost nonexistent. And as usual, when the Internet is weak, the writing comes through, but the images are hopeless.
I pulled into Cripple Creek about 10 a.m. I had to deal with some traffic leaving the Springs, but once I started heading up the pass, the traffic cleared out, and I cruised on into Cripple Creek without a problem.
The first thing I needed to do was get a camping permit from the police. The Cripple Creek law allows property owners to camp on their vacant land, but only for 30 days at a time, and it requires a permit from the police to prove that you're not a squatter on someone else's land. Cripple Creek has a lot of vacant, but owned, land, and many of the landowners don't show up very often, so squatting has been a problem.
Cripple Creek has undergone significant changes, and the impact has been profound, but you wouldn't realize it unless you had spent time here 35 or 40 years ago. Is the town better now? Yes, it’s in many ways, but in other ways, it’s worse.
To me, the town no longer has the down-home, friendly feel it once had. Instead of the local businessmen and women all knowing one another, and helping each other out when someone needed help, now it's all about the business of making the most money possible, no matter who you have to Step on to accomplish that.
When I was in the restaurant business in Cripple Creek, there were four or five other restaurants in town. Although we were technically in competition with each other, any restaurant would lend food to the others if they were running out of supplies. And I can say that because, over the years, I have borrowed food from and loaned food to other restaurants in need of help. I seriously doubt if the casinos do anything like that nowadays.
theboondork
Cripple Creek from the top of Tenderfoot Hill.
Cripple Creek at the bottom of the picture, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the background.
A couple of normal hard rock mines are visible in the foreground, and in the background is an open-pit mine, which is how most mining is done today in Cripple Creek
I think what I’m going to do on this mini-vacation will be different from what I normally do. Usually, if I have a bunch of pictures, I post most of them on my blog every day. However, when I’m not traveling, I have no interesting images to share.
This time, I think I’m going to put three or four pictures every day that represent what I’ve been doing that day, and then save the rest for when I’m not traveling and have nothing to show except flower pictures. Hopefully, that will keep the pictures more interesting.