The furnace kicked off at 3 a.m. The pipes had frozen again. Outside, the thermometer read 11 degrees below zero. February 1982. Altitude: 10,152 feet.
A man sat at the kitchen table in long johns and wool socks. He held a pink slip. Not the first one on this street. Not the last.
The Climax Molybdenum Mine sat 11 miles up the mountain and it had always been Leadville’s beating heart. Molybdenum is element 42. It strengthens steel. For thirty years it had strengthened everything in this town too; the wages, the storefronts, the school enrollment, the particular confidence of a place that knows what it is and why it matters. Four thousand men had punched the clock at peak production. Three quarters of the world’s supply came from one hole in one mountain above one town.
Then the price dropped below the cost of pulling it out of the ground. The workforce didn’t taper. It collapsed. By December 1982, roughly a thousand workers remained. The rest were home. Staring at walls. The unemployment rate cracked 20 percent and kept climbing. Harrison Avenue, the main drag, started collecting plywood where glass used to be. Ghost towns don’t announce themselves. They arrive the way mine collapses do. A groan. A settling. Then silence.
Ken Chlouber, 38 years old, was one of the men holding a pink slip. Miner. Local businessman. Colorado State Representative. He had skin in every layer of Leadville’s economy and he watched all of it soften and sink. He started doing what desperate men do. He started throwing ideas at walls to see what stuck.
One night he stood before the Leadville city council with a straight face and proposed they start a yak ranch.
He meant it.
The yak ranch was not a joke. It was the product of a man who had run out of conventional options and was now rummaging through the unconventional ones. The council heard him out. Nothing came of it. The search continued.
The specific villain here was not a man or a company, though AMAX, the parent company of Climax Molybdenum, had made the calls. The villain was arithmetic. Molybdenum had traded at $30 a pound. Then it didn’t. Copper mines in Chile and Zambia had found molybdenum in their own ore bodies. Cheaper labor. Cheaper overhead. The market moved and Leadville had nowhere to move with it. A town that had built its entire identity around a single extractive industry now had no industry. No identity. No plan.
Merilee Maupin felt it too. Chlouber’s sister-in-law, a waitress and local business owner, watched the same slow erasure happening outside her window. She was practical where Chlouber was visionary. She kept things moving where he conjured things into existence. She didn’t know yet how much she’d need both of those qualities.
Neither of them had the idea yet. That was still four months away, held inside a race in Boulder that Chlouber hadn’t attended yet.
May 1983. The Bolder Boulder 10K draws 12,000 runners through Boulder’s streets. Chlouber is there. Not running. Watching the people. Watching the money move.
Something clicked that wasn’t charity or desperation. It was math. Clean, cold, specific math.
Twelve thousand people ran six miles.
He thought: if 12,000 people will run six miles, maybe 100 people will run 100 miles.
Leadville sat at 10,152 feet above sea level. The mountains around it peaked at 12,600. The terrain was brutal, the altitude punishing, the weather genuinely dangerous. The air at 10,000 feet holds roughly 30 percent less oxygen than at sea level. The local hospital told organizers to prepare for casualties. They wanted body bags on standby.
For thirty years the mining industry had treated those mountains as a resource to be extracted. Chlouber saw them differently now. He drove back up the mountain with a new geometry in his head. What the mountains took from Leadville in one economy, they might return in another.
He brought the idea to Maupin. She didn’t laugh. She said yes.
The town laughed for both of them.
People called them crazy. Not affectionately. The word carried weight. Resources were scarce. Time was scarce. Hope was becoming scarce. Spending any of it on a footrace through the mountains seemed like a civic delusion.
Chlouber pawned his wife’s jewelry to cover the permits, the insurance, the essentials. “We’ve only got one shot at this,” he said. “We’re going to put on a race whether anyone comes or not.”
August 20, 1983. Forty-five runners stood at the start line of the first Leadville Trail 100.
One woman. Carol La Plant. Forty-four men. None of them entirely sure what they had signed up for.
The course did what the course always does. It reduced people. The mountains added elevation on top of elevation. The 30-hour cutoff was not generous. A cross-country skier named Skip Hamilton crossed the finish line first, in 20 hours and 11 minutes. Ten runners finished. Ten out of forty-five.
By any conventional metric, this was a troubled debut. By the specific metric Chlouber had in mind, it was a foothold.
The ultrarunning world, small in 1983 and self-selecting by nature, paid attention. The race was hard in the way that serious people find attractive. Word moved through that community the way it does. The next year, more runners came. Then more. The Leadville Trail 100 MTB launched in 1994. By the time Lance Armstrong lined up for it in 2008, the race had become a cultural landmark. A global destination.
Merilee Maupin was there for all of it. She built the operational architecture that let Chlouber’s vision survive contact with reality. Her name appears in fewer headlines. The work she did appears in every result.
Leadville is not a ghost town.
The man who saved it once tried to do it with a yak ranch. When that didn’t work, he pawned his wife’s jewelry and pointed 45 strangers at the mountains. It turned out that human suffering, properly organized and voluntarily undertaken, was worth more per pound than molybdenum ever was.
Trail Note
The Leadville Trail 100 Run takes place annually in August. The course covers 100 miles through the San Isabel National Forest at an average elevation of 10,000 feet, with the highest point at Hope Pass at 12,600 feet. The 30-hour cutoff remains in place. Entry is by lottery. Altitude acclimatization is not optional.
Ken Chlouber’s motto, still recited at the start line: “You’re better than you think you are. You can do more than you think you can.”
Sources
- Blevins, D. “Leadville Trail 100: How ‘Crazy’ Ken Chlouber Saved a Mining Town.” *The Denver Post*, August 16, 2013.
- Branch, J. “Leadville’s Race for Survival.” *The New York Times*, August 10, 2012.
- “Climax Molybdenum Company.” *Colorado Encyclopedia*. Colorado Humanities and History Colorado.
- Healy, P. “The History of the Leadville Trail 100.” *Trail Runner Magazine*, May 22, 2015.
- Kramer, K. “The Race That Saved a Town.” *5280 Magazine*, August 2013.
- “Living the Legend: The Leadville Trail 100.” *Ultramarathon Daily News*, October 29, 2013.
- “Leadville Trail 100, August 20, 1983 — Results.” *UltraRunning Magazine* archives.
- Schrader, Ann. “Mining History, Climax is part of it.” *Rocky Mountain News*, July 2, 2004.
- “Ken Chlouber, The Founder of the Leadville Race Series.” *Running Wild with Rich Roll Podcast*, Episode 261.
A note on The Outpost: This publication reconstructs historical events from verified primary sources. Atmospheric and scenic details are drawn from period records where available and from historical context where noted. Specific temperatures, weather conditions, and scene-setting details included for narrative purposes are grounded in documented historical context but should not be read as verbatim archival record. All named individuals, dates, and documented events are sourced in the reference list above. The Outpost is narrative journalism, not academic history — but it holds itself to the facts that matter.
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