I Retraced Jennifer Nelson’s Final Steps to an Abandoned Colorado Mine
The mine shaft is still open and breathing, an eight-foot-wide hole in the Earth with no flowers set beside it, no memorial, only blocked now by a black mesh fence and a red sign inscribed with four words: Stay Out Stay Alive. It is set back under the shadows of towering spruce and fir, 90 feet up a moss-covered hill off an old mining road in the San Juan Mountains, where I have come on a late summer afternoon to retrace the last steps of Jennifer Nelson.
I hold onto a lodgepole and creep over the weathered fence, just far enough to see the mine’s exposed flat rock walls disappear into the ground, enough to see that if anyone were to fall in, they wouldn’t be able to climb out. The canopy of trees drowns out all light, but down the slope, the sun bathes grey rock on the trail.
It is easy to understand why Jennifer loved this area, why she had come here on October 20, 2025, the last day of her life. I had made the short drive from her home in Ridgway, Colorado, and up the Million Dollar Highway over Red Mountain Pass, weaving my way through the San Juans until I reached a narrow dirt lip on an old mining road. I parked next to a grizzled hiker who looked exhausted. “Howdy,” he had said, pulling off his boots on the bumper of a 4Runner. I waved and slipped around a green gate that keeps vehicles off the trail.
My boots crunched the gravel, and there was no other sound, except for the distant hum of an electrical substation nearby. The trail was framed with views of the Red Mountains, and as I glanced over my shoulder back at the highway, I saw the rooftops of the historic Idarado Houses, built more than 100 years before for miners and their families in the abandoned ghost town of Eureka, Colorado.
The trail, too, was littered with rusted relics from mining camps: a half-buried oil can with chipped teal paint, an oxidized metal tool tray and, tucked away in a meadow, a buck-and-pole corral, once used to shepherd mules and horses that hauled silver and copper down the mountain. I had been told the mine was hidden in the trees, only a quarter-mile up, and I realized I had walked right past it. I carefully backtracked, looking for any sign, and when I finally spotted the top of the black fence in the timber up above the trail, my heart jumped into my throat. I thought of Jennifer.
At 54, she had already collected a lifetime of adventures in the backcountry, and when she arrived here for another hike on a Monday afternoon in October, she found a reprieve from life as the owner of a pet-sitting business and member of Ridgway’s planning commission. She needed these walks, both for peace of mind and for her ailing back, which always felt better after she finished a trek in the woods.
The mountain had spotty cell service, and she could walk uninterrupted while her dogs trotted alongside her. Earlier that day, over lunch, she had told her husband, Jeff Rivera, that she was headed up to the trail. She’d take Mia, their border collie mix, and another dog she was looking after for a friend.
“Be careful,” he told her, but he otherwise wasn’t worried: she knew the trail like the back of her hand, and Jeff thought it was just another day in the life Jennifer had dreamed of living when she moved from Denver to the San Juans a decade earlier. He went back to work that afternoon, but by the time he returned home again that evening, Jeff thought she would already be home, too. He texted Jennifer: “What do you want for dinner?”
There was no answer, and by 5:30 P.M., he grew worried. It was starting to get dark. Jeff hopped into his Ford F-150 and sped up the Million Dollar Highway, hoping to see Jennifer pass him on her way down, but when he arrived at the trailhead, he found her Toyota Tundra empty.
He squeezed past the green gate and ran up the mountain. The temperature had dropped, and he could see his breath as he screamed her name. Jeff had seen a lot as a volunteer firefighter in Ridgway, but nothing could prepare him for this. Without a cell signal, he ran back down the trail to call 911, to tell the police that his wife was missing.
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