Boreas Railroad Station Site, Colorado Postcard

"Boreas Railroad Station Site, Colorado" by Catherine Sherman. The Boreas Railroad Station Site is a 19 acre (7.7 ha) site in Pike National Forest near Como, Colorado which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993. The listed area, at 11,498 feet (3,505 m) elevation, spans the border of Park and Summit counties and is on the Continental Divide. The mostly gravel road to the pass is about twenty miles from Breckenridge. It some areas the road is barely wide enough for two cars going in either direction to pass, with a steep drop off. The pass itself is a wide meadow. The pass was formerly known as Breckenridge Pass in the 1860s, when it served as an early route for thousands of prospectors during the Colorado Gold Rush who crossed from South Park to look for gold in the valley of the Blue around Breckenridge. In 1866, it was widened to a wagon road that accommodated stagecoaches. In 1882, under the direction of Sidney Dillon of the Union Pacific Railroad, the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad (by then controlled by the Union Pacific) begun laying narrow gauge tracks up the pass, which Dillon renamed in honour of Boreas, the Ancient Greek god of the North Wind. A post office operated there from 1896 to 1905. The rail line over the pass was a major engineering feat, primarily because of the winter snows at high altitude. When completed, it had dozens of snow sheds along its route, which approached a 4% grade in many places. The line was abandoned in 1937 by the Colorado & Southern, along with most of the company's narrow gauge right-of-way.