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For generations, we had a good arrangement. Leadville,
at 10,152 feet above the tides, was the Highest City in the United States. Alma, at 10,355 feet, was the Highest Town in the United States.
Between them lay Mosquito Pass (known as the Highway
of Frozen Death
in pioneer days), 13,188 feet from sea
level and the highest vehicular pass in North America. Just
up Frémont Pass from Leadville was the
unincorporated settlement of Climax, zip code 80429 and the
highest post office in the United States at 11,320
feet.
The Colorado & Southern railroad spur line
switchbacked upward behind the Climax depot to the
Summit County Warehouse,
which, at about 11,600
feet, was the highest point reached by a regular railroad
in this country.
These glorious facts were known to every red-blooded Coloradan, and provided a fair division of hypsometric superlatives between Leadville and Alma.
Under state law then, a municipality had to comprise at least 2,000 residents to call itself a city. Thus Leadville, population 2,629 in 1990, enjoyed Highest City status, while Alma, population 148, retained Highest Town.
Then our General Assembly changed the law, so that any ambitious burg, no matter how minuscule its population, could legally declare itself an official city. Thus no more statutory distinction between Leadville and Alma.
Leadville responded a fortnight ago observing that the highest spot inside the city limits is not the mere 10,152 feet of city hall, but a glorious 10,430 feet somewhere on the east side of town -- maybe Chicken Hill, or some mine dump. By official vote of the city council, that became the city's official elevation.
Alma's boosters haven't resorted to voting the town graveyard, but they have measured its elevation: 10,680 feet, and they have evidence that the cemetery is inside the town limits. If that doesn't beat Leadville, they might annex 14,172-foot Mt. Bross, which should settle the matter unless Leadville can stretch across the valley and annex Mts. Massive, 14,421, and Elbert, 14,433.
The saddest part of this rivalry is that I can't decide which place to root for. I visit Leadville with reasonable frequency these days, and always have a good time, even if there's a now a coffee bar, a sure sign of decadence.
Alma is off my current paths, but when I was editor of the Breckenridge newspaper, local restaurants were always so crowded during ski season that it was faster (and much cheaper), to drive over 11,541-foot Hoosier Pass to eat lunch at the Hand Hotel in Fairplay.
En route, we passed through Alma, and you have to love a
town that appeared to possess only two operating
businesses. On one side of the street was Alma's Only
Bar,
and on the other was Alma's Other Bar.
So let's blame our legislature for instigating this needless rivalry by removing necessary distinctions between town and city. And so it serves the General Assembly right that it might be homeless for two years while the building under the gold dome undergoes renovations.
Given the recent importance altitude rivalries, this might be the time to move the capitol anyway. Colorado is the highest state in the nation, but the Mile High City is not the highest state capital. That honor goes to New Mexico with 6,989-foot Santa Fe.
Cheyenne is not officially higher than Denver because Cheyenne does not have an official elevation. That's what Harold C. Bowker of the U.S. Geologic Survey discovered when I asked. However, he thumbed through maps until he found a benchmark along the railroad tracks in the city -- 6,061 feet, considerably above a mile high.
We need to elevate our capital, and we could move it to Salida. It's near the middle of the state, it finished fourth in the election that made Denver the capital, and it's 7,036 feet high, thus putting Santa Fe in its place.
Then again, our children have ample bad influences without bringing in legislators and lobbyists, and our traffic is already getting so snarled that people sometimes honk if you stop in the middle of the street and talk to someone going the other way. Besides, if geography matters, then Hartsel is the best spot -- it's smack in the middle, and at 8,860 feet, it's reasonably safe from other states' challenges.
The better solution, though, would be a series of capitals while the Denver building gets overhauled. As Bob Ewegen once observed, rural legislators are more familiar with urban problems than the reverse -- that's because rural legislators spend half the year in the city.
But if the capitol operated for three months in Holyoke, then Las Animas, San Luis, Dove Creek, Olathe, Maybell, Walden, etc. -- each place would serve for three months during the renovations -- then our General Assembly would get a feel for those strange and unknown parts of the Colorado Third World lacking interstate highways and scheduled air service.
Rural medical care and telephone service would start to seem important to the decision-makers and the media, and perhaps, for a few years after returning their deliberations to Denver, they'd remember that there's a state out here.
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