Aspen

Founded as a mining camp in the Colorado Silver Boom and named for the trees, the town boomed through the 1880s until the Panic of 1893 collapsed the silver market. What followed were the quiet years: half a century of steady decline to fewer than a thousand people by 1930. Its fortunes turned in the mid-twentieth century. It stands in a remote part of the Sawatch Range and Elk Mountains on the Roaring Fork River, just below 8,000 feet on the Western Slope, eleven miles west of the Continental Divide.