Breckenridge — Page 2
By Tom Kagy | 27 Jun, 2026

Our Saturday side-trip took us to Vail and Leadville—polar opposites in look and feel.

The Covered Bridge crossing Vail Creek offers a charming access to the discreet and tasteful Vail Town Center. (Tom Kagy Photo)

Our first full day in Breckenridge was a Saturday, the day with the week's lightest work demands, allowing hours for one of our longer drives.  For breakfast we stopped in at the cozy and crowded Columbine Cafe on Main Street for a hearty veggie scramble and pancakes about the size of my head.  

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Bellies full, we headed north up Highway 9 to begin a loop formed by I-70 west, SH-24 south, H-91 north, with a final eastbound leg on I-70 to Silverthorne for the home stretch back down H-9 back to Breckenridge.  

The day's plan called for exploring Vail—a 40-minute drive away—en route to historic Leadville, the area's leading mining town and the highest incorporated city in the United States at 10,152 feet.  

Vail's Town Center is a posh mall that runs along Vail Creek and provides an accessible public area for visitors and the town's recessed and reclusive residential areas. (Tom Kagy Photo)

Vail proved to be what we had been led to expect by others: an understated and overpriced ski community for those seeking refuge from the tourists.  The Vail Town Center, a tasteful mall built on a gracious green hillside above an underground garage, was the only area accessible to visitors in May, after the close of ski season.  Its tasteful boutiques and restaurants were pleasant to stroll past but didn't detain us long from getting back onto westbound I-70 for the fast and tortious snake through some of the most rugged Rockies terrain around.

Vail's Town Center is a posh mall that runs along Vail Creek and provides an accessible public area for visitors and the town's recessed and reclusive residential areas. (Tom Kagy Photo)

Once we turned south onto US-24 we found ourselves climbing up to Tennessee Pass at 10,424 feet which cross the Continental Divide separating the northern drainage of the Eagle River and the southern drainage of the Arkansas River.  The drive offered a memorably vertiginous view of the ridges and valleys sprawling below.

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Leadville is unmistakably blue-collar as befits an old mining hub that remains the main residential area for the hundreds currently working at the Climax molybdenum mine about 13 miles northeast of the city. 

Leadville's mining heritage runs even deeper than Breckenridge's, having minted a number of silver and lead millionaires in a long and illustrious mining history that only came to a close in recent years.  In its heyday the industry produced sufficient wealth to support the legendary Tabor Opera House and more than its share of frontier tall tales.  Today it's a haven for outdoorsmen, endurance athletes and tourists, like us, looking to soak up air haunted by the town's boom-bust past.

But the first thing we soaked up was some lunch, famished as we were by the time Highway 24 took us down into Leadville.  Our eyes were caught by the outdoor picnic-style tables in front of Buchi Cafe Cubano on Harrison St, the main avenue of historic Leadville.  The menu of mostly sandwiches catered to the restaurant's largely latino working-class clientele.  We sat outside enjoying a hearty and tasty Cuban sandwich, along with an empanada and a house salad that seemed surprisingly fresh for a remote mountain mining town.

Harrison Street is dotted with structures that recalled the town's 19th-century glory days.  Catty-corner from Buchi Cafe is the three-story redbrick Tabor Opera House built in 1879 sitting a bit forlorn on the south end of the historic strip.  A couple blocks north is the posh Delaware Hotel built in 1888 in the Victorian style. 

Even today it's easy to see that back in the day mining wealth flowed freely enough to warrant adorning the hotel's redbrick structure on the Harrison side with ostentatious white segmental window hoods with decorative keystones.  The effect bestows on the structure a level of opulence that seems surprising for something built in a two-mile high frontier mining town.  And the Silver Dollar Saloon, billed as The Best Wild West Saloon in America", attests to the free-spending mindset of miners who had struck their lucky veins.  Their heyday may have long passed but these structures from the town's gilded age remain in active use to give visitors a vivid reminder of the town's glory days.