Jeep Trails to Colorado Ghost Towns | Robert L. Brown | My Thoughts on Jeep Trails to Colorado...

Jeep Trails to Colorado Ghost Towns | Robert L. Brown | Nostalgic fourwheeling

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Jeep Trails to Col...

	Jeep Trails to Colorado Ghost Towns Robert L. Brown Caxton Press, 1963 - 245 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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Settle into your 4-wheel drive vehicle or any old easy chair and take off for the mining camps of Colorado! This book is an illustrated history of fifty-nine towns famous during the gold and silver rushes of the 1800s with directions on how to get there.

My Thoughts on Jeep Trails to Colorado Ghost Towns

I love this book because I have traveled to most of the Ghost Towns talked about in this book. Some of the pictures are the same as ones that I photographed while there. I am doing a slide show for my children of the places we visited and it helps me label the pictures for them. It is hard to remember the names of places until I got this book. We were there about 35 years ago and at that time we used the book Stampede to Timberline by Muriel Wolle as a guide. We basically followed the Switzerland Trail and started out from Boulder. We met Jimmy Hubbard at Ward who was a firemen and brakeman on the Denver-RioGrande railroad who told us about the book Switzerland Trail of America which we bought from the author, Forest Crossen.

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Nostalgic fourwheeling

I bought this book while on vacation in Colorado. Other reviewers suggest that it is out of date and certainly there are more explicit trail guides to this State but it's a great piece of nostalgia. I love the pictures of flatfender CJs when they were almost new and ghost towns before the weather took away many of the buildings. It sits alongside other vintage Jeep books in my house.

Good for picking out sites of interest.

This book may have been the first gift my husband ever gave me, so I may be inclined to go easy on it. It is true that the book is outdated and that some of the sites and trails it describes have changed considerably since publication. We also found that the description of how to get to one of the ghost towns was inadequate--we happened on the remains of some buildings eventually, but that was sheer luck; we'd given up on finding the town and were headed back from our trip.
However, the book told us a lot about locations of potential interest, and we've had a lot of fun checking out places we never would have known about otherwise. It's nice to have older pictures to compare to what we see, and Brown offers great summaries of places we may want to learn more about.
I'd definitely recommend this book--just make sure you have supplemental information to avoid frustration while navigating.

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Oldie but Goodie

Robert L. Brown is one of the pioneers of the rediscovery and the history of Colorado's Ghost Towns. While this book was written in the mid 60's and is woefully out of date as a current guide, it does offer a unique perspective because of it's age. You will find here photos of the way these towns looked at the time the book was originally published. As a student of Colorado history, I find these invaluable. Comparing the current state of these towns to Brown's photos and historical photos of these towns in their heydey allows you to appreciate their fragility and their rate of decline. Don't buy this book as a guide, but buy it for it's historical perspective.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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