Forest Service takes down historic mining cabin

Agency did not get formal OK; hikers mourn loss of shelter

For more than 100 years, a small cabin stood on a steep, tree- covered mountainside in Keystone Gulch.

When the 12- by- 18 foot structure was first built in the early 1900s, it housed miners who would crawl into tight tunnels built into the hillside in search of gold, silver and other precious ores.

Abandoned for decades, the Rainbow Mine cabin captured the imagination of at least a few of the hikers who stumbled upon it in the forest. Through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, visitors installed new windows, a woodfire stove and hung a Colorado state flag on the wall.

Then, last fall, the U. S. Forest Service removed the roof and walls of the cabin, leaving little more than a foundation where the building once stood.

“We’ve had a lot of problems over the years with the Rainbow cabin specifically because it’s up Keystone Gulch close to the ( ski) resort,” Dillon Ranger District Ranger Adam Bianchi explained. “We’ve had people inhabiting the cabin. It’s a challenge to keep people from not living in there.”

The cabin, Bianchi said, posed a potential liability for the Forest Service, leading officials in 2020 to begin the National Environmental Policy Act process required to partially demolish the structure. That process involved a public comment period on the proposal to remove the structure for safety reasons and required consultation with Colorado’s State Historic Preservation Office, he said.

Forest Service officials claim that they consulted adequately with the State Historic Preservation Office. But the State Historic Preservation Office has indicated that it had not signed an agreement approving the Forest Service to tear down the cabin, which was determined to be eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

Meanwhile, some locals who spent time at the Rainbow Mine cabin over the past several decades lamented the loss of a treasured spot when photos of the decommissioned cabin were posted this spring to a Summit County community Facebook page.

“It’s sad news for the many people who made the steep hike up or the ski/ ride down ( to) enjoy the cozy place in history,” longtime Summit County resident Flip Brumm wrote in that post. “Here’s to the End of the Rainbow.”

Rainbow Mine Cabin

The history of Summit County is filled will with mining lore. The moment gold was discovered around 1859 in this part of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, people started flocking here by the hundreds and thousands, according to Breckenridge History Executive Director Larissa O’neil.

Breckenridge became a hub for mining activity, but the industry expanded throughout the county, including large mining operations in Montezuma and smaller operations scattered throughout the Snake River basin and Keystone area.

“Our mining history is all around us — the evidence from the prospectors and the underground miners and the dredge boats and the hydraulic mines,” O’neil said. “We had all sorts of mines here — all aiming to get the same thing: gold and other products.”

The Rainbow Mine, though, was not active during the “heyday of gold mining,” according to Forest Service archeologist Thomas Fuller. Established around 1910 or so, the mine would have been a hard rock mine, where adits or shafts were dug into the side of the mountain to get the ore straight from the source, he said.

“It was a weird time in Summit County after the 1880s,” Fuller said. “The silver act came in, and silver was taken off the U. S. standard for currency. So that killed the mining business. Gold was still gold, and silver and other minerals were there. But it basically died out after that.”

During the World War I and World War II era, hard rock mining had a resurgence in the Summit County region, Fuller said, with mines like Rainbow Mine popping up throughout the river basins.

When the Forest Service did a historical inventory of the Rainbow Mine in fall 2021, the site consisted of the main lumberframe cabin, an attached shed, a stable or barn- like structure, a well, the remnants of a privy, mine waste dumps and a couple of collapsed adits.

“The site is characteristic of hundreds of small mines throughout the mining districts of Summit County, but very few of them are as well preserved as this nearly complete complex,” the Forest Service’s historic resource documentation on the Rainbow Mine states.

A pair of Denver Post newspaper clippings dated 1922 that hung on the wall of the bunk- room cabin, “underscore the excellent condition of the site,” the historic resource documentation states.

The Rainbow Mine does not appear to have been very successful. Production figures recorded for the mine show an output of 31 tons in 1916 and 37 tons in 1917, a “very small output,” according to the historical documents. The ore assayed at 2.39 and 1.43 ounces of gold and 1141 and 749 ounces of silver in each of those years, respectively, as well as small amounts of lead and copper.

The workers who likely lived out of the bunk cabin during the mining years would have labored in the “difficult, dangerous, destructive and disgusting” conditions that were persistent throughout the mining era, O’neil said.

“This was not a flashy, ‘ everyone is making it rich’ kind of place,” O’neil said.

Memorandum of agreement

The Rainbow Mine was found eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. But when the Forest Service partially removed the cabin last fall, Colorado’s State Historic Preservation Office apparently did know that the demolition was happening.

In fact, Chief Preservation Officer Patrick Eidman said in an email that the State Historic Preservation Office didn’t even know that the demolition had occurred until the Summit Daily reached out this spring with questions.

“Throughout the Section 106 process, SHPO indicated in various communications to the Forest Service that a MOA ( a memorandum of agreement) needed to be executed before the project could proceed,” Eidman said.

Fuller said the Forest Service is working retroactively to get a memorandum of agreement signed for the Rainbow Mine cabin.

The demolition of the cabin was only partially completed in order to preserve the history of the site, he said.

“The history is still important,” Fuller said. “So we want some of that structure still there that points toward our culture and our history here in Summit County but isn’t too inviting a place for people to live in.”

Flip’s cabin

When Fuller first recounted the history of the Rainbow Mine cabin, he noted that the structure had another local nickname, “Flip’s cabin,” but he couldn’t say where exactly it came from.

Flip Brumm, though, knew where the nickname came from. Brumm, who lives on the outskirts of Silverthorne, has been visiting the cabin since he discovered it while hiking and rock climbing in Keystone Gulch in 1982.

“There is a rock outcropping there that is fun to rock climb,” Brumm said. “That attracted me to go up that gulley. Then, there is an obvious trail. I followed it and discovered the cabin. There was probably a foot of rat nest stuff all over. I cleared all that out and eventually cleaned it up.”

Over the decades, Brumm was somewhat of a caretaker of the Rainbow Mine cabin. He said he would hike there almost once a month to help keep it tidy for overnight hikers.

Brumm said he at one point installed new glass in the windows, and he and some friends moved a woodfire stove to the site years ago. In 1988, he even proposed up there.

“I would say I’ve been up there the most in the past 30 years,” Brumm said, “more than anybody else.”

Former Keystone resident Mike Clary said he met Brumm when he and his wife stumbled upon the cabin for the first time around 2000. Clary, who described himself as an “amateur historian,” said for the better part of a decade he and his wife researched and hiked to more than 700 abandoned mining cabins in the Snake River basin, few of them in as good condition as the one near Rainbow Mine.

“When my wife and I first moved up there in about 1993, we were compulsive hikers, and we found a lot of old mine cabins,” Clary said. “We thought we should maybe document these because they are slowly deteriorating.” After he injured his leg hiking, Clary said he and his wife moved to California for its warmer climate since it wasn’t worth shoveling snow if he couldn’t ski. He, too, had no idea the Forest Service had torn down the walls of the cabin.

“It’s like tearing up the history of the basin,” Clary said. “The people who are out here hiking, they don’t like just the trees and elk and deer. They also like some historic features. I find it a shame that the basic history, the mining history of the area, is being systematically removed.”

For his part, Brumm sees the Forest Service’s “point with squatters habitating and fire danger.”

But Brumm said he also remains disappointed with the loss of history — a place that provided shelter for many weary travelers over the years — which was chronicled through journals he kept there that visitors signed and decorated with artwork, comments and poetry.

“So many people enjoyed it. I don’t think it was hurting anybody,” Brumm said. “That was a lot of work to just leave that little bit. … Now, it’s a demolition site.”

Without the cabin there, Brumm said he doesn’t see much reason to ever return.