Cindy Neely thought the mountain that rises to the north of Silver Plume, Colorado, would make an ideal location for an adventure park—an outdoor recreation site with ziplines, ropes courses, and other physically challenging activities. “It’s a perfect spot for it, because in the valley is Interstate 70, a heavily traveled rural interstate,” she says. “There are [millions of] people a year who go up and down that road, so it would be very visible.”

The trouble was, Neely, a longtime Colorado preservationist, didn’t want an adventure park there. She figured it was only a matter of time before the land, which encompasses parts of Republican Mountain and Silver Plume Mountain, was developed, and she had a feeling the 200-plus residents of the town of Silver Plume wouldn’t want this to happen, either.

“This is where silver mining got defined,” Neely says. “This district was the biggest silver producer in the region until Leadville, Colorado, came along in 1877, but between the discovery of silver in 1864–’65 and 1877, this particular set of mines were the place where it was happening, where all the new techniques of silver mining were developed.”

Neely and the county’s Open Space Commission kept in touch with the owner of the claims, who also hoped to preserve the mountainside’s mining history. Eventually, the claimowner agreed to sell all 95 claims to the town, provided it could come up with the $500,000 purchase price (plus around $50,000 to do the necessary preparations for the sale). The town would have a year to find the money, starting in January 2022. Neely, who lives in nearby Georgetown, pitched the idea at a Silver Plume town meeting. “I do the PowerPoint thing about the mountain and what the choices are,” she says. “At the end of the PowerPoint I look at them and say, ‘So, do you want to buy a mountain?’ There’s a little silence in the room and one after another they said, ‘Yeah, I do.’”

Lining up legal protection for the site would prove to be complicated. Colorado Open Space Alliance, a group of publicly funded local and regional open space programs, supported the safeguarding of the land, as did the nonprofit Mountain Area Land Trust and other conservation groups. But because the Silver Plume land contains historic mining sites that the town intended to preserve, it fell outside the scope of traditional land conservation, which typically focuses on natural landscapes.

So the Silver Plume team would have to find another entity to work with it on creating an easement to ensure the site’s long-term preservation. Neely knew just the person to ask: Cindy Nasky, director of preservation programs at the nonprofit Colorado Historical Foundation. The organization holds more than 100 conservation easements on historic places throughout the state, including one on the Hotel de Paris Museum, a National Trust Historic Site in Georgetown. Neely believed a hybrid project might fit its parameters. “I think, ‘Well, this is a cultural site,’” she says.

The foundation ultimately agreed to accept an easement on the property, which paved the way for $200,000 in funding from History Colorado’s State Historical Fund. This money followed the town’s initial pledge of $25,000 and additional donations from private citizens and foundations as well as local corporations and nonprofits. The county Open Space Commission had also added $100,000. By January of 2023, Silver Plume had raised all the money, and its purchase of the mountain went through.

Neely, Nasky, and others managed the pieces that would need to fall into place for the easement to be completed, including an environmental assessment and reams of title research. Another to-do: a current conditions report on the site, including its cultural resources. One of the most prominent of these is Smuggler Mine, which operated from the 1890s to the 1950s, producing gold, silver, lead, and zinc. Its 40-foot-tall timber-and-steel headframe is mostly intact and had been stabilized for safety by the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.

The team divided the mining resources into three categories to make them easier for the town to manage; they labeled Smuggler Mine as one of five “interpretive” sites. Under the conditions of the easement, Silver Plume must preserve and maintain each interpretive site. Eight more are classified as “stewardship” sites. “These are largely inaccessible,” says Nasky. “Stabilization is encouraged but not required.” And the remaining 12 fall under the “ruins” category, reserved for resources that need the least amount of attention. “We had to be considerate of what sort of responsibilities we were going to put on the town of Silver Plume insofar as maintaining it per the conservation easement baseline,” Nasky adds.