Life of a Ghost Town

There is a ghost town, high in the Colorado Rockies, inaccessible to all but the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles, that I’ve visited since I was a child. I’ll call the town Inez, instead of its real name, since the folks who live in that solitary spot are there for a reason: they don’t like being around a lot of people, and they aren’t interested in attracting tourists. Many of them are my relatives, too, and I’d like to stay on speaking terms. They aren’t hermits, exactly, but they aren’t very sociable, either. “This is my hideout,” one put it.

Inez, surrounded by a fortress of peaks, has always seemed like a remote and rustic Shangri-la, far from the rest of the world and the current time period. When I was a child, my family would jeep up the narrow, rocky shelf road that leads to Inez, climbing over the final crest and into an aspen valley and a town that wasn’t much more than a handful of old log cabins in various stages of decay. There was no electricity or plumbing up there, but having no modern conveniences was part of the fun: we cooked on wood-burning stoves or over campfires, lit gas lanterns, cooled our perishables in river water, and wandered to the outhouse when we needed to. The ghost town, with its abandoned saloon and one-room school, gave us kids plenty of fodder for stories. At night, roasting marshmallows, we’d tell creepy tales about miners, bandits, and crazy hermits and feel the spirits of those who’d