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OPINION
Last week I mentioned the Stage Road and thought I would take today and say more about it. Been to Cripple Creek on the Gold Camp Road? Since the problems with the tunnels on the Gold Camp Road in the 1980’s the lower portion of the road has been made only a trail. Now the stories of that piece of road since then could fill this paper many times over. I want to talk about what is used to get around that closed portion. It is called the Old Stage Road, but really it was not much of a stage road. The main routes were far away. It was mainly a trail into the country behind Cheyenne Mountain and even up to the summit of Pike’s Peak. There were attempts to develop the area in the 1870’s and ‘80’s, but it just did not catch on. In the 1870’s there was even a logging camp up the road. When Cripple Creek boomed in the 1890’s it was improved a bit for wagons. It was the short route between here and there, but it was a tough trip. The long way up Ute Pass and through Divide was twice as long, but was the preferred route. The third railroad to Cripple Creek tried it, but also suffered from the challenges. It was converted to the Corley Mountain Highway in the 1920’s. From 1893 to 1923 the Stage Road wound around up and over the hills, traveled by only the hardiest souls. Once the Corley opened up most of the traffic switch to it. Only the people who really needed to go that way used it. There were a number of cabins and ranching areas only reached by this route. It almost became abandoned, in fact more than half of it was already unused and vanished back to nature. The road today, and you must take my word for this if you have driven it, is much nicer than it used to be! At first it was mainly a pack trail. In the 1990’s when a way around the tunnels was needed it was studied. Better curves and climbs were built here and there. The road was widened and made easier, plus cutting over toward the Gold Camp Road as soon as possible. More than 75 % of the old road is gone, never to be rebuilt. Now and then you can see bits of it from the Gold Camp Road. The Gold Camp Road as it is today lacks this large chunk of the original route of the stage road. The seasoned gold camp visi So why was it called the old Stage Road? In the 1920’s and 30’s when many roads were named, someone thought it had been used by stage coaches.
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