High on Middle Mountain, at about 10,600 feet, there is a meadow at the end of a rough road where a town used to be. For a few years around 1920 it had bunkhouses and a mess hall and men chasing a vein. It never made real money — and a promoter was still selling shares in it a year before everyone left.
Drive Middle Mountain Road (Forest Road 724) up from Vallecito Reservoir, park where the road gives out around 10,000 feet, and walk. About four and a half miles on, the trees open onto a grassy bench near Runlett Peak, close to 11,000 feet. This is Tuckerville. The buildings are gone; what's left is the meadow, an overlook above old cliff workings, and quiet. It sits in the Cave Basin mining district — and, contrary to a lot of the old write-ups, in Hinsdale County, not La Plata, where early accounts placed it by mistake.
Told here as legend — because that is what it is.
Every gold camp needs an origin story, and Tuckerville's is the tale of a Southern Ute man, Weaselskin, said to have paid for meals with raw gold nuggets from a strike he never named. It's a settler legend, traceable to a single retelling, and there is no Ute-side version of it — but it's woven into how the valley remembers this place. We tell it in full, alongside the man's actual documented life, on its own page.
La Plata County's official history is blunt about how thin the mining really was up here. “No significant 'strikes' occurred until 1913,” it records, "when gold was found in the Cave Basin area on the Dowell property. The nearby Acord and Tom Boy claims also yielded some gold.“ A year later, ”the May Murphy Mine claim in 1914 added to the local gold fever and a small town, Tuckerville, developed to serve the miners in the remote Cave Basin."
That is the documented arc: a real 1913 discovery, a flurry of claims, and a camp thrown up to serve them — the fever outrunning the ore almost from the start. (The claim appears as “May Murphy” in the county history and “Mary Murphy” in the state geological record; it's the same mine, spelled two ways.)
Source: Seyfarth & Lambert, Pioneers, Prospectors and Trout: A Historic Context for La Plata County, Colorado (2010), p. 27.
The county history is spare and specific: in the Pine River drainage, "Tuckerville, a gathering of seven log buildings served the miners in the little boom of the late 1910s. It was abandoned in 1928. No standing buildings remain." This was a hard place to keep a town — a ridge near 11,000 feet where winter is measured in survival, not months.
Other accounts count it a little differently, and none is firsthand: a local trails history says six bunkhouses, a shop, and a mess hall “in full operation from 1920 to 1929”; a regional almanac says the place “never amounted to more than several log cabins and a dining hall.” Seven buildings or six-plus-a-mess-hall, 1928 or 1929 — the histories don't quite agree, and we lead with the county's count rather than pretend they do.
Here is the detail that tells the whole story. On February 10, 1928, the Durango Evening Herald ran an advertisement from the Mount Runlett Metals Company of Cortez, promoting “the new mining camp of Tuckerville.” By then the first excitement was fifteen years old — and the camp was the same year it was abandoned. We don't call that a swindle, because no source documents fraud. We just note that the promotion was still running as the ore ran out.
Two things sharpen the picture without tipping into accusation. The company sold shares in the “Mount Runlett” deposits — yet nearly two decades later the state's own compiling geologist, J. W. Vanderwilt (1947), noted ore reported "on the slopes of Mount Runlett, which he could not locate." The promoter was named for a mountain the government geologist couldn't find on the map. And the Mount Runlett Metals Company appears in no corporate registry we could find, just as no source anywhere names who “Tucker” was. The camp keeps its founder's secret, and its promoter's paperwork is missing — we report both as gaps, not as proof of anything.
So — was there gold? A little. The recorded production credited to the district is small enough to list in full. The Colorado Geological Survey, quoting Steven and others (1969), tallies the Holbrook, Mary Murphy, and Silver Reef veins over the whole sporadic run of 1913–1928 at just this:
| Gold | 12 oz |
|---|---|
| Silver | 237 oz |
| Copper | 2,900 lb |
| Lead | 1,700 lb |
A short revival in the mid-1930s added the rest: USGS Bulletin 1434 records 62 tons of ore for 109 ounces of gold in 1934–36 — figures first misattributed to “Vallecito Basin” and later corrected to Cave Basin. Add the two together and the district's entire documented lifetime gold output is about 121 ounces.
“…small quantities of high-grade ore, which was packed out on horses and mules.”
USGS Bulletin 1261-F (1969)
About 120 ounces of gold across a quarter-century — it would fit in a coffee can. That is the whole yield of the dream, packed out on animals an ounce or two at a time.
Production figures: Colorado Geological Survey, Metal Mining Districts of Colorado (2015), quoting Steven et al. (1969); and USGS Bulletin 1434 (1977). Quote: USGS Bulletin 1261-F (1969).
The camp was abandoned in 1928, the county history says, with mining “waned to almost no activity” by 1929. There were sporadic pokes at the ground into the mid-1930s — the small 1934 and 1935–36 lots are the record of them — and then silence. Nobody moved back. We do not claim a population figure, a founding by any named “Tucker,” or a post office, because none of those is documented; where the histories reach past the evidence, so would we.
“…these figures should have been credited to Cave Basin, an area of small production…”
USGS Bulletin 1434 (1977)
In 1969 the U.S. Geological Survey published a mineral survey of the San Juan Primitive Area, Bulletin 1261-F, and looked hard at Cave Basin. Its verdict was final:
None of these deposits appears to be large enough to have economic potential.USGS Bulletin 1261-F (1969)
Here is the twist the old prospectors never saw coming. That 1261-F survey was itself a Wilderness Act study (Public Law 88-577): the government was appraising Cave Basin's minerals precisely to decide whether the country around it should become protected wilderness. Finding no paying ore helped clear the way. The miners' bust became the wilderness's case — this ground went to the Weminuche, not the mines.
Tuckers Tunnel, the prospect about a mile south of the townsite near Runlett Peak, turned out to hold something no assayer in 1913 was looking for. In 1980, during a uranium survey, Nicholas Theis and Michael Madsen collected a mineral there that had never been described anywhere on Earth. Named theisite and formally published in 1982, Tuckers Tunnel is its world type locality — the one place science first knew it from. The camp that never found paying gold gave the world a mineral instead.
Theisite: mindat (type locality loc-6211); Williams, Mineralogical Magazine 46:49–50 (1982).
The Forest Service still points the way. Its current guidance notes that Middle Mountain Road (FR 724) “leads to the upper Bear Creek drainages and Runlett Park, as well as the old mining town of Tuckerville.” Here is how to reach it.
What you'll find up there is subtle. Cave Basin is a karst basin — its sinkholes and caves give it the name — and the mining left small marks: “small diggings and piles of rock,” one recent hiker's account notes, “some with small amounts of copper mineralization colored green, blue, or turquoise, dug by prospectors looking for gold long ago.” Southeast of the main karst, “several mines and old log cabins … can be explored if you know where to look. All are relics from the 'Tuckerville' mining era.”
Pair it with the route notes and OHV rules on Middle Mountain and the wider Vallecito trail guide.
Site-today notes: Bob Thompson, “Cave Basin Hike,” Seniors Outdoors! newsletter, March 2021.
No known photograph of the Tuckerville camp survives online. We looked; if one exists in a family album or a historical-society collection, we'd be glad to feature it — get in touch. The one period image we could place is the 1928 advertisement above, which itself survives only as a reproduction in the Okie Legacy eZine — a manual search of the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection found no original. The 1964 USGS Granite Peak quadrangle crop remains a placeholder pending image tooling.
Primary sources: Seyfarth & Lambert, Pioneers, Prospectors and Trout: A Historic Context for La Plata County, Colorado (2010) — the county's official history, used as the backbone; the Colorado Geological Survey's Metal Mining Districts of Colorado (2015), quoting Steven and others (1969); USGS Bulletin 1261-F (1969) and Bulletin 1434 (1977); J. W. Vanderwilt, Mineral Resources of Colorado (1947); the U.S. Forest Service, San Juan National Forest (Middle Mountain Campground page, updated May 22, 2026; Columbine Ranger District, Bayfield, (970) 884-2512); La Plata County Historic Preservation's self-guided driving tours; Bob Thompson's “Cave Basin Hike” (Seniors Outdoors!, March 2021); mindat.org and the Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum (Haynes & Hlava, Rocks & Minerals 73(5), 1998) for the mineralogy; and the Okie Legacy eZine for the 1928 advertisement. The Weaselskin story is a settler legend, drawn from Vallecito lore (Warlick, Vallecito Country, p. 22), not the documentary record — told in full on the Weaselskin page.
This is a living community record. If you can source what we couldn't — a photograph, the identity of “Tucker,” a documented population — we'd like to hear it →