Tag: Colorado

BEFORE TELLURIDE & ASPEN WENT CRAZY: 1950-1980/Photos by Herb Ringer (ZX# 101)

From Edward Abbey’s “The Journey Home”
“The town of Telluride was actually discovered back in 1957, by me, during a picnic expedition into the San Miguel Mountains of southwestern Colorado. I recognized it at once as something much too good for the general public. For thirteen years I kept the place a secret from all but my closest picnicking cronies. No use: I should have invested everything I had in Telluride real estate. In 1970 a foreigner from California named Joseph T. Zoline moved in with $5 million and began the Californica-tion of Telluride. Formerly an honest, decayed little mining town of about good souls, it is now a bustling whore of a ski resort with a population of 1,500 and many more to come. If all goes badly, as planned… 

… Men weep, men pray and kneel, but money talks. Money walks and talks and gets things done.
— EA

HERB RINGER: “He’d rather be in Colorado”…1946-1971 #1 (ZX# 82)

Herb would return to Colorado scores of times over the next half century. He photographed and documented every town or ghost town he came across. He would, over the years, draw a detailed series of maps, to scale, of the mining towns that were, even in the fifties fading into history and dust. In addition to his photographs and these amazing maps (…and I plan to publish at least a good sampling of them soon), he would often spend his winters just thinking of Colorado. As he and his parents were weathered the Reno winter, he wrote his own histories of many Colorado towns and mining districts, often depending on his own extraordinary memory. His facts were rarely wrong.

But visually, there is nothing Herb Ringer accomplished that was more impressive, or insightful, than his remarkable Kodachrome transparencies. Below is just Volume 1 of a series of Colorado towns and its people, that he was wise enough to photograph, and I was lucky enough to inherit…

Real Silence… by Damon Falke

I woke up early this morning. Early is 3:30 am, this after an 11:30 bedtime. I sometimes hear people talk about how they can’t sleep. I wonder if they mean what I mean when I say that I can’t sleep.…