Towns & Other Places in Colorado

When I say “Towns and Other Places in southern Colorado,” I'm indicating that there's a lot of material to work with here. We have incorporated cities, incorporated towns, unincorporated towns, and unincorporated rural county. We have Native American settlements and mining/ranching ghost towns. Some places have been occupied for over 1,000 years, others went from boom to bust in less than 10 years. They are "Towns and Other Places." What I am trying to do in these pages is to give you, my reader, a small snapshot of what is really here, now. 100 years ago, this countryside and some of its' inhabitants were the main characters in some pretty wild ten-cent novels sold all over the East Coast and in Europe. A lot of those novels were translated into TV series and, if you're like me: raised in America and educated in public schools, quite a few of us ended up with a very slanted view of the Wild West and what it was really like. What I am showing on these pages is the present reality. Combine that with some historical facts and a different picture of the realities of the Wild West emerges... then again, all the blah, blah facts and history don't make much difference: this is still gorgeous and wild countryside with quite a few quaint little towns and some small cities scattered around.

Some of the towns in our area are going through a kind of urban renewal where they rebuild downtown in a replica of what it was like in Victorian days, except this time, the streets are brick instead of dirt and mud, and there isn't horse manure or cow patties all over the place.

Las Animas and Huerfano Counties in Colorado, and Colfax County in New Mexico, all had significantly larger populations in 1900 than in 2000. That was because of the coal mines. Most of those were closed by 1957 and almost all those folks left. The population of southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico also took a large hit with the Great Depression and the years of the Dust Bowl drought. Another several years of drought in the late 1950's, early 1960's wiped out quite a few of the remaining ranch/farm towns and left us with lots of broken down relics outside of the major towns in the area.

Now, we're seeing a wave of soon-to-be-retiring baby-boomers looking at this neighborhood with an eye towards spending the rest of their lives in this unpopulated, unpolluted and inexpensive but unknown countryside.

That's why I built this website: what you see here is based on my own explorations. And, as you can see, I'm a bit in love... that's how this site got out of hand...

The map above shows all the counties in Colorado except one: Broomfield. Broomfield is a city/county and is just too small an area. You can click on any of the names on the map above or you can use the list below. These pages have population and growth stats on them and some of them have pannable and zoomable maps directly on them, while others have links to similar maps for that county.

Slowly I add new names to this map. When you select a name on this map you will be taken to that part of this site. I have also added listings of business and tourist services to most of these names (actually, by county), things like Hotels & Motels, Bed & Breakfasts, Dining establishments, Campgrounds & RV parks, Real Estate Services and Financial Services. Museum listings and other Touristic Activities also show up on some of these pages. Again, what you see here is the results of my own explorations, and I still have a day job.

On a regular basis, my presentations outgrow this map. After all, this is an organic site.