Two tiny towns sitting side by side under the biggest sky in Colorado. Westcliffe and Silver Cliff were the state's first International Dark Sky Community, and at nearly 7,900 feet they sit right under the wall of the Sangre de Cristo Range. Silver Cliff used to be the third-biggest town in Colorado back in the silver-boom 1880s — now it's a quiet main street with a famous haunted cemetery and a hell of a view.
Westcliffe, Colorado 7,867 ft
- In 2015 Westcliffe and neighboring Silver Cliff became Colorado's first International Dark Sky Community.
- At nearly 7,900 feet it is billed as the highest-elevation Dark Sky Community in the world.
- It sits in the Wet Mountain Valley beneath the dramatic Sangre de Cristo Range to the west.
- Its 1901 Denver & Rio Grande railroad depot at 102 Main Street is preserved by the All Aboard Westcliffe museum group.
- The valley around it runs roughly 30 miles long and 12 miles wide at elevations between 7,500 and 9,000 feet.
Silver Cliff, Colorado 7,982 ft
- Silver Cliff sprang up as a silver mining town in the late 1870s and was incorporated in 1879.
- By the 1880 census it had 5,040 residents, making it Colorado's third-most-populous town after Denver and Leadville.
- After silver prices crashed its population collapsed; just 609 people lived there as of the 2020 census.
- Its windswept cemetery is famous for mysterious 'ghost lights' first written about in a 1956 Wet Mountain Tribune article.
- The cemetery ghost lights drew national attention when featured in the August 1969 issue of National Geographic.
Sangre de Cristo Mountains 14,351 ft
- The Sangre de Cristo Mountains are a subrange of the southern Rockies stretching about 250 miles from south-central Colorado into northern New Mexico.
- Their highest summit is Blanca Peak at 14,351 feet, east of Alamosa.
- The range holds ten fourteeners, including Crestone Peak (14,300 ft) and the notoriously hard Crestone Needle (14,197 ft).
- The name is Spanish for 'Blood of Christ,' a nod to the crimson glow the peaks take on at sunrise and sunset.
- Culebra Peak (14,047 ft) is the only Colorado fourteener that sits entirely on private land.