The History of Tripping Falls

The strange inception of the town of Tripping Falls and its subsequent transition to obscure tourist oddity seems to all revolve around poultry, clumsiness, a touch of the supernatural and pure dumb luck.

A Supernatural Start

In not-so-far-away Aspen, the would-be 8th governor of Colorado, Davis Hanson Waite, moved in to his new home. He and his wife moved from the East Coast — setting an unfortunate precedent of East Coast transplantation that would plague Colorado for centuries.

Shortly after the move, Waite’s wife — Frances Eliza Russell — died after consuming undercooked chicken feet. She was 44 at the time. News of her death accompanied a photo and a mere one-paragraph obituary in the papers of the Western Slope. But her life after death would turn out to be very consequential for Tripping Falls.

Shortly after Russell’s death, a vagabond hunter and fur trader — James Corwin Price — was traveling north near what is now called the West Fork Encampment River. He was looking for Mountain Mahogany to make bows; the bark was also widely used in medicinal tea. In his journal, he wrote about a “chance encounter with the spirit of Frances Russell” who guided him off his path into a small valley near what would be come to know as Black Mountain.

A combination of potent medicinal tea and the vision of Frances Russell’s apparition caused Price to trip and take a nearly life-ending fall. When he came to, he was lying near a rocky riverbed by a small, but previously undiscovered waterfall.

Although the falls didn’t meet the height/size criteria at the time to be considered a true “waterfall,” Price was so enchanted by the falls (which he aptly dubbed Tripping Falls) and the surrounding area, that he decided to establish a settlement there. He never took credit for founding the town, however; he attributed it to Frances Russell, who is listed as the town’s official founder in historical records. So Tripping Falls was indeed founded by a ghost.

That same year, Davis Waite became Colorado’s 8th governor. As the first elected representative of the People’s Party, Waite had a huge influence on Colorado’s working class — particularly miners and farmers — and subsequently helped early Tripping Falls thrive as an agrarian community.

Early Agrarian Tripping Falls

Shortly after the panic of 1893, through which Tripping Falls and its small, but steady economy was unfazed, Waite passed away; he was in the middle of cooking Thanksgiving dinner in Aspen. News of his death hit Tripping Falls particularly hard as he’d been such a champion for the unique Tripping Falls economy.

To honor his death, each year around Thanksgiving, the Tripping Falls Chamber of Commerce puts on its annual “Turkey Death Match” — which is less violent than it sounds. All of the turkeys are butchered and used for the town’s Thanksgiving celebration anyway. The turkeys are dressed in football jerseys and given a set of obstacles to navigate. If a turkey actually finishes any of the obstacles, he has the honor of being slaughtered first. 

In 1905, President Roosevelt named the lush, wooded area around Tripping Falls the “Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest.” This made no difference to anyone in the town. 

During the Great Depression, when jobs were desperately sparse around the country, Tripping Falls again prospered as people were able to fill unique high-altitude ranching jobs that helped the region grow and thrive.

In 1946, Mike the Headless Chicken came to visit Tripping Falls with much fanfare.

In 1964, before the Beatles played Red Rocks, they visited Tripping Falls briefly, misunderstanding the non-psychedelic nature of the naming convention. The group never returned.

Mutant Migration

In 1969, the government conducted the Rulison Project underneath the rural town of Rulison, Colorado. It was supposedly a “safe” nuclear explosion, and was recorded as such, historically. But the government tried to cover up the residual impact the explosion had on the residents of the small town — radiation in the water and natural gas reserves underground. In exchange for their silence, the residents of Rulison were well-compensated and encouraged to move to other mountain towns while the government tried to decontaminate the area. Tripping Falls took in several of the slightly mutated Rulison refugees — many of whom started some of Tripping Falls longest-standing businesses. 

As mountain town tourism ramped up elsewhere in Colorado, Tripping Falls once again faded into obscurity until 2014 when marijuana was legalized. Again, misunderstanding the naming convention of the falls, throngs of misguided “weed tourists” and young transplants tried to find their way to the secluded mountain town. This resulted in two significant situations: 1) There was an extreme spike in missing persons cases reported from 2014-2018 and 2) The Lodge at Tripping Falls started booking out years in advance.

Each year to “celebrate” this influx of tourists and to assist in rescue efforts, Tripping Falls holds their annual “100 Acre Hide and Seek” event. Those who make it back from the hunt are welcomed to a weekend-long festival of art, music, local spirits and food.