~ History ~

A biographical history of Mountain Creek Ranch
By Donald Earl Nelson

I was only 9 when I first went up to the Mountain Creek Ranch, of course at that time we just called it …”the pasture”. In 1952 my dad (Earl V. Nelson) bought about 180 acres of land from Mr. Kendall Sloan so we could graze our small herd of cattle on it during the spring and summer months. In the fall, he would load them up and bring them back home. It used to take several trips with his old stock truck to get them all relocated.

I always thought those cattle were pretty lucky; they got to graze all day in the shade of the aspen trees, drink fresh water from the stock tank that was filled by a spring my dad had discovered and also graze down by the free flowing Freeman Creek. When I used to help my dad fix fence, the views from the property were amazing, but of course the cattle could have cared less about the view.

My dad was born in the heart of the Colorado Rockies in the beautiful Frying Pan Valley. His dad was a timber man and their family of eight lived in a cabin at Norrie, which was once the biggest town on the Frying Pan River. At that time Norrie boasted of the largest lumber operation on the western slope of Colorado. My grandfather (Swan Nelson) would cut down trees at Deadman’s Gulch, and then slide them down long log chutes to the sawmills in the valley below.

When I was little our family used to go camping up the Pan and while sitting around the campfire my dad, a great storyteller, would tell me and my sister stories about the history of the Frying Pan Valley.

I was fascinated by his tales about the band of Ute’s called the “White River Indians”, he said they were the first inhabitants who lived in the valley for hundreds of years until the fur trappers and mountain men came in search of big game. The Indians hunted and fished in the valley during the long cool spring and summer months. Being raised in the valley, he always laughed when he said that the Indians didn’t ever stick around for the winter, they always followed the game herds as they migrated south for the winter.

Much like my Grandmother Lydia, the Indians gathered seeds of grasses, wild berries and fruits and planted corn, beans, and squash in the mountain meadows and harvested them in the autumn for the winter. I’m sure the Indian women also picked and appreciated the alpine wildflowers.

The Colorado gold rush helped the Frying Pan Valley become more developed when hundreds of railroad workers and their families flocked to the area to begin building the highest broad-gauge line in America over the Continental Divide. The Colorado Midland Railroad officially opened for business in 1897.

My grandfather said the hardest job was when the miners had to blast through the solid rock of the Continental Divide during the construction of the “Hagerman” and “Busk-Ivanhoe” train tunnels, which provided a much needed shortcut to and from Leadville.

The Midland Railroads main job was the transportation of the precious metal ore being mined at both Aspen and Leadville. The city of Leadville still holds the world record for producing the most amounts of silver ore.

My Grandfather met John Ruedi, who had emigrated from Switzerland, when he would come to the area for hunting and prospecting. Mr. Ruedi latter returned and homesteaded a tract of land on the valley floor. Besides ranching, Mr. Ruedi latter developed part of his swampy land into horseshoe shaped fish ponds from which he sold the freshly caught trout to the dinning-cars on the Midland Railroad. Grandpa Swan said Mr. Ruedi was a very kind and gracious person.

The town of Ruedi first began as a Depot and water-tank stop for the Midland Railroad. When the market for fresh trout developed, a two story fishermen’s lodge was built followed by the construction of many cabins, a school, and two log hotels for the employees of the local Roaring Fork Plaster Mill. The U.S. Post Office at Ruedi finally closed its’ doors in 1941.

My grandfather, a ship builder from Sweden, told me that he eventually went to work for the Midland Railroad because it was much better work than being a timber man. The railroad became very successful during those years with the added service of transporting passengers, freight, war materials, local fruit, coal and livestock.

By the time my dad was 12, just like the Indians who were now long gone and living on the Ute reservation, he hunted elk, deer, bear and antelope that freely roamed in the area. He said beaver especially were found everywhere as well as an unlimited supply of fish and fowl. My dad was one of the best fly fishermen I ever saw, second only to his mother, Lydia Jakeman Nelson.

Grandpa Swan also remembers the day when the Midland Railroad carried President Teddy Roosevelt over the Continental Divide and through the Hagerman tunnel, stopping at Hell Gate to take in the magnificent views and continuing on down into the Frying Pan Valley. The President paused briefly to look at the 7 castles, but the people of Basalt were very disappointed when his colorfully festooned Presidential train didn’t even stop there on its way to Glenwood Springs. Roosevelt stayed at the Hotel Colorado so he could go bear hunting on the flattops. Stories say he shot six bears on that one hunting expedition.

The silver panic of 1893 all but closed down Aspen, Leadville and Basalt and was also very hard on my dad’s family as well. They moved out of Norrie and bought property near Ruedi and began ranching for a living. When my grandparents retired and moved to Basalt, my Uncle Leon took over running the ranch. His family raised livestock and sold whole milk to the Glenwood Creamery as their principal means of income.

My grandfather says he rode on the very last trip of the Midland Rail Road, from Basalt to Leadville, when it closed down in the fall 1918. The Busk-Ivanhoe tunnel rails were taken up and its’ name was changed to the Carlton Tunnel and used for automobile traffic for a brief time. Grandpa Swan said it was fun to go to Leadville through the tunnel, except that the tunnel was always leaking dirty water. The tunnel was finally closed to traffic when it completely filled up with water.

The Frying Pan locals happily joined in removing the rails, pulling up the ties and helping grade the road-bed between Ruedi and Basalt, thus creating the first dirt road up the Frying Pan.

My father and his brother Albert went to South America with Tucker McClure’s construction company and worked, as heavy equipment operators. When Tucker returned home, he bought a big ranch and built a fabulous brick house that is now the Cap-K Ranch.

As kids, whenever I visited my cousins at their Ruedi ranch, we would walk a mile up the dirt road to the Meredith Store and buy a soda or an ice cream bar, but never both at the same time. The town of Meredith, now relocated because of the reservoir, included one of eight lumber/saw mills in the area that at the peak of its operation turned out 100,000 feet of lumber daily.

One day as I was playing with my cousin Rodney at the ranch and a city slicker stopped and asked us how to get to Rudy, we both laughed so hard the guy just finally drove off.

We often drove up to Thomasville, originally called Calcium, to see the old lime quarries that supplied limestone to the four large brick kilns, a few of which are still standing. In the old days they would heat the limestone to a very high temperature (5,000°F) turning it into powdered lime (quicklime) that was used for the smelting of ore at the various smelting plants.

In 1964 my dad built the Hillcrest Trailer Court, outside of Basalt, when he heard that many Bureau of Reclamation workers were moving into the area to begin construction of the Ruedi Dam as well as the tunnels that would divert the water to the eastern slope. Our little Basalt School (12 grades) immediately doubled in size.

My Uncle Leon’s family was forced to leave their ranch and move down valley as the earth filled dam neared completion. The official filling of the Ruedi Reservoir began in the summer of 1968.

My dad built a new cattle shoot when the brand new road was built around the reservoir, making it a lot easier to get the cattle to and from the pasture. Dad continued to run cattle on the pasture until he died in 1971. My mother then rented out the property to some other ranchers who pastured their cattle on the property in return for maintaining the water stock tank and repairing the fences.My mother recently named the pasture “Mountain Creek Ranch” in honor of my father.