The road to Colorado’s Cloverdale Mine is terrible. For a while, it’s basically made of rocks nicknamed baby heads, rounded stones that bounce vehicles so hard, passengers could justifiably wear helmets. These features are periodically augmented by big boulders whose traverse feels like a demented mechanic is jacking one side of the car up and then dropping it down. And those are the easy parts. The hard parts come higher up, as the road rises from around 8,500 feet of elevation toward its terminus above 11,200 feet. Here, the “road” sometimes becomes an axle-wide area where a sloping talus field has been made flat, the roadbed itself a pile of rocks that shift beneath the tires.
These are the reasons that many of the aforementioned rocks bear the scars of cars gone by, scrapes from metal frames and running boards, and why, every quarter mile or so, you can bend down and pick up a car part that’s been torn from its vehicle. At least you can if you’re walking up the road—which I was, toward a spot called Rainbow Lake.
There, in the summer of 2024, a dozen friends were setting up camp for the weekend. It was their annual pilgrimage to the defunct Cloverdale Mine. If it were still operating, Cloverdale would be one of the highest-altitude mines in the United States. It was also the longtime home of a local legend named Bill Humble, who stayed at this hard-to-access, oxygen-deprived ghost site from the early 1970s until his death in 2002.
At Rainbow Lake, Humble’s 34-year-old grandson, J.J. Humble, was helping organize the group of campers. He’s been reuniting friends and family here since 2009 to ensure that the mine site, and its former population of one, are not forgotten. “Sharing that place is very important to me,” he says.
Around him, tents popped up, their residents having come from as far away as New Jersey. The attendees soon began to gather underneath a communal canopy, where dinner’s main course was to be Italian sausage.
The group talked like old friends do—in a shit-shooting way. About hypothetical lost civilizations, space-debris cleanup, whether we are alone in the universe. And, of course, about the trek they would make in the morning to the mine.
J.J. has been strengthening the bonds of this community of Cloverdale supporters, hoping to get the mine and its buildings, his grandfather’s home, designated a state or federal historical site. That desire is complicated—by Cloverdale’s remote location, about 100 miles by car southwest of Colorado Springs, and by its relationship with the United States Forest Service—so in the meantime, he’s dedicated to making sure it stays at least a personal historical site.
Cloverdale’s story begins decades before Bill Humble got there. In 1919, hunters killed a wild sheep near the top of Eagle Peak, an over-13,000-foot hulk of a mountain in the Cloverdale basin. While they were bringing down their kill, they purportedly spotted a big copper vein. The hunters and various collaborators soon filed mining claims in the area.
By 1922, they and others had formed the Cloverdale Mines Company, intending to excavate a tunnel that would intersect the copper deposit.
Infrastructure, like cabins and an electrical station powered by a stream, soon followed, with supplies shuttled in on horseback, via burro, and on foot. The would-be miners built the now-terrible road, at a cost of around $745,000 in today’s money. By the 1930s, they’d completed a mill for processing the ore and an assay office where they could qualify and quantify the riches they harvested from the earth. The structures, surrounded on three sides by mountains with peaks almost halfway to cruising altitude, were a hardy attempt to bring human society up this high. They looked, though, like feeble monuments to such society, perched among the pikas and pines and UV rays, mere hangers-on in their alpine environment.
Despite those investments, the riches never came. In the decades that followed, the miners netted some gold and silver from their .3-mile-long tunnel, but the hunters’ fish-story copper never came through. Later, a study by the Bureau of Mines and the Geological Survey found no evidence that the supposed copper vein even existed. Also: A fire devoured some of the outpost; the Depression happened; the mine company changed hands multiple times; and vandals stripped the site of its electronics—focused, ironically, on the copper parts.
The piece of land would nevertheless prove valuable to at least one person: Bill Humble, who inherited four of the original claims to the mine from his grandmother.
Humble had had a hard life. He lost his hearing after a childhood bout with scarlet fever. He refused to learn sign language, preferring to lip-read and speak. After he married, he had five sons, one of whom died when Humble accidentally backed over him with his car, unable to hear people yelling at him to stop. His first wife was killed in a separate car accident.
Her death impelled him to turn away from that past: He left California, where he’d been living, and headed for Colorado to cash in on his inheritance.
In 1972, for the lofty price of $3,000, Humble purchased the mine, tunnel, mill building, mine camp, and power plant. He also acquired the remaining claims from the then-owners, according to a report supported by the Colorado State History Fund.
The Cloverdale basin soon became his home. “After all the stuff that went on in his life, he just wanted to be up on the mountain,” says David Jarvis, executive director of the Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp, which sits at the bottom of the Cloverdale road. “That was his holy space.”
In that timberline temple, Humble attempted to revive the now-empty mining camp. “He saw the opportunity up there to live the life that he wanted. That was tinkering and fixing things and building and being remote,” says J.J.
J.J. has been coming to Cloverdale since before he was born, when his mother was pregnant. “If you wanted to see Grandpa, you had to go up the hill,” he says. His family would stay in the miners’ cabins, jokingly calling one the Broadmoor, after a five-star resort in Colorado Springs, and another the Stanley, after the hotel near Rocky Mountain National Park that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining. “The remoteness of it all was a lot to take in.”
Now, J.J. is used to Cloverdale’s remoteness, seeking it out and seeking to share it with those who make the yearly trek.
Early the first morning of the trip, the group of campers rose, making coffee and assembling breakfast burritos, preparing to take the bumpy ride up to Cloverdale, about 2.5 miles away. I slugged some tepid instant coffee and shouldered my backpack, planning to meet the group at the site a few hours later when they’d tackled the road in their lifted four-wheeling rigs.
When I reached the area where Humble had lived off and on for 30 years, a herd of wooden structures with concave roofs greeted me. Inside, among the gapped and snapped floorboards, the debris of his life remained: camping lanterns, a thermometer, tipped file cabinets, a can of beans, a rolling pin, an old issue of Popular Mechanics with the cover story “Flying Saucers Are Real.” A beat-up camper van, which had made it up the road decades ago when the road better lived up to its designation, didn’t have any windows but did have its sun visor down, as if someone were preparing to drive it away. A couple hundred feet above, the mine entrance and the mill loomed. The latter was a multistory structure terraced down the steep slope. A large sign that said “Cloverdale Flotation Ore Mill” had once beamed jubilantly from the top floor, though it had since fallen down.
Humble had built some of these buildings, felling and hauling trees on his own, and had restored or shored up the existing ones.
When J.J. arrived, his SUV bearing bumper stickers that said “Roam” and “Just Gonna Send It,” he told his friends about his grandfather’s accomplishments as proudly as if they were his own. Then he turned to lead them up a thin track through a boulder field, toward the mill and the mine’s tunnel, where Humble had continued the excavation that had never made anyone rich before him and didn’t make him rich either. When Colorado increased the annual maintenance fee for the claims, Humble dropped most of the 200 he’d had, keeping only the original 4 from his grandmother.
Humble spent the majority of his time up here, even staying for part of the winter, when the snow’s height exceeded that of the cabins. He’d snowshoe out from the site occasionally; more often, he ventured down to what became the Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp.
“There was a lot of letting him live down here in the wintertime,” says Jarvis. No one else was at the camp off-season, and Humble became the de facto caretaker. “He roofed probably every cabin here at least once,” says Jarvis. The camp would stock him up on food, like giant cans of government-subsidized commodities, and send him back to his solo site.
But he wasn’t exactly alone in his universe. The mine is on public land off a public road. “He communicated with so many people that came up there that, first of all, had no idea that he was up there,” says J.J.
One hiker, a Texan woman named Becky de la Houssaye, took him up on the offer of a particularly fateful tour of the mine. She later mailed him the pictures she’d taken that day.
A few years later, she moved to Denver, and her dog didn’t like the big city. So she wrote to Humble again, asking whether he knew of anyone rural who might want to adopt the Labrador.
He did. And de la Houssaye came regularly to visit her dog, and Humble, at Cloverdale. “After a couple of years, we got to be good friends and decided to get married,” she says simply. Then, when she was done working her shifts as a research technician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, she would go up to Cloverdale for the weekend—as Humble’s wife.
The Lutheran camp would also march its attendees the seven-plus miles to the site, where Humble would give them a tour, including of the mine tunnel, where ice crystals that looked like butterfly wings would form. De la Houssaye calls those crystals a fairyland.
“That was something,” agrees Jarvis, “to walk with him in there and kind of live in his world.”
And Humble’s world was the Cloverdale basin. “He didn’t have to meet the expectations of other people or what people thought he should be,” says Jarvis. “He was just living, being Billy.”
When Humble was alive, his relationship with the forest service could perhaps best be described as “live and let live.” “Once he did pass, they were quick to swoop in and put their foot down and say, ‘You guys don’t have the right claims to own it,’” says J.J. “‘It is our land.’” And that was, technically, correct: Humble’s existing claims were “unpatented,” meaning he had the rights to minerals and the rights to mine, but he had no claim to the land itself.
Around the time of his death, the Turner Ore Mill Foundation, funded by the Colorado Historical Society, performed an assessment of the mine site—determining whether it could feasibly be restored for educational purposes and whether the buildings could at least be stabilized so they could function as a safe interpretive site. Either option, the foundation’s report noted, would require a lot of work. “The main problem, from a hazmat point of view, is all the junk everywhere,” it stated. “There is so much non-hazardous stuff that it is difficult to tell what might be there that is hazardous!”
But there was hazardous stuff: drums of oil, a cleaning compound from the 1960s, car batteries, lead Humble had extracted from car batteries to use in his solar-power system. The forest service removed those, by helicopter, a few years ago.
The report recommended stabilizing the site, shoring up the buildings for safe visitation and preservation. State historic funds could provide grants to do this, it said, but only if Cloverdale became a recognized state or federal historical site.
De la Houssaye and J.J. have been working on that, but there are obstacles—like needing permission from the forest service. That may be difficult to get, given the site’s remoteness, which makes upkeep challenging.
Currently, there’s no historical marker at Cloverdale to commemorate the miners or the keeper of the basin, and no stabilization has been done. Thus, things have begun to fall apart—battered by wind, pressured by snowpack—and the family is barred from maintaining the buildings, since it doesn’t own them. The cabins no longer even remotely resemble their hotel namesakes. The mine tunnel is now blocked by a glacier of sorts, permanently frozen residual precipitation from storms.
Still, J.J. continues to come up each year, trudging a shifty path to the mill as he did on this trip.
At the top, the group shambled up to the little glacier, peered into the tunnel, and slid back down the ice. They cracked lunchtime beers and took a group picture on a huge earthmoving machine that somehow, long ago, had made its long way up the mountain. They sipped and stared at the natural vista and its human-made additions, awed by how anyone had survived in the Cloverdale basin, let alone gotten all this stuff up here.
While they stared, a pickup truck carrying three hikers arrived. J.J. walked over and introduced himself, telling the driver and passengers—strangers—the story of his grandpa, since his grandpa wasn’t here to tell the story of the mine anymore. He was ensuring, in his own way, that this small civilization would not be lost.•
Sarah Scoles is a freelance journalist and the author of the books Countdown, Making Contact, They Are Already Here, and Astronomical Mindfulness. She spends a lot of time in a solar-powered cabin in south-central Colorado.
