Phantom Canyon Road

The road began as the Florence Free Road in 1892, a public alternative to the toll Shelf Road. Two years later the Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad — a three-foot narrow gauge — won the race to the new goldfields, sending its first passenger train up the canyon to Victor on May 27, 1894. For eighteen months the F&CC held a near-monopoly on the district, and over its life it hauled more than $150 million in gold ore downgrade to Florence's smelters while hauling supplies and excursionists up. Twelve stations served the grade; the steel spans at Adelaide, now on the National Register, replaced a wooden trestle that burned in 1896.

Nature ended it. A thirty-foot wall of water ripped through the canyon in 1912, taking out miles of track and five bridges; the line dissolved and the rails came up in 1915. The grade reopened as a public highway on August 30, 1918, dedicated at Glenbrook with Governor Julius Gunter and a noonday lunch for two hundred — and rebuilt after later floods by as many as five hundred volunteers, which is the file's vote for the canyon's real character.

Beyond the executed prisoner, the claims ledger runs to the standard cast of a mining corridor: miners and railroad men glimpsed along the grade, apparitions near the ghost towns of Wilbur, Adelaide and Glenbrook — communities the floods and the market emptied — and the felt company a hand-cut canyon supplies at dusk. Colorado Public Radio put the register plainly: reports of apparitions abound on what used to be the railroad from Florence to Cripple Creek.

The honest index is that the road frightens more people than the ghosts do. The drive climbs from 5,500 to 9,500 feet past a sheer five-hundred-foot drop without guardrails, through two one-lane tunnels hewn by hand, over old wooden bridges — a route where the documented hazard and the legendary one share the same narrow roadbed. The archive files the hauntings under reported experience and the drop-offs under public record.

Phantom Canyon Road is now the spine of the Gold Belt Tour Scenic and Historic Byway, a state and national scenic route from Penrose to Victor, its interpretive signs marking the stations and towns the floods and the market erased. Bighorn sheep and eagles file the daytime sightings; the phantoms keep the shift that follows. The record keeps a railroad, a monopoly and a flood. The legend keeps a prisoner who never checked out. Drivers keep their eyes, wisely, on the road — which the file suggests has always been the safest policy in Phantom Canyon, for reasons that vary by century.