In the town of Ophir, 13 miles south of Telluride in the San Juan Mountains, one will see fences made of skis, wooden houses equipped with prayer flags and hand-painted signs smattered with children’s handprints urging visitors to drive slowly.

Established as a mining town in 1881, the town is split into East and West Ophir. The two halves are separated by a blank strip of land perhaps half a mile wide. This stretch is deliberately left empty because that’s where avalanches come down in the winter.

No one is allowed to build in the empty land, and the avalanches sometimes close off the whole town for days on end. In these cases, the truly dedicated might cross-country ski their way out of the valley. Locals in years past dubbed the town “Oh-Fear.”

But people still live here; in fact, Ophir is purely neighborhood, encompassing around 50 houses, 180 humans, 51 dogs and a few local legends such as Scott Smith – born in 1957 and raised with his two brothers as mountain boys in “Appalachia Ophir.”

“The people in Ophir are a different breed,” Smith said. “We always were.”

He and his brothers covered every inch of the Ophir Valley growing up and saw countless avalanches of all different sizes and locations.

“We would be outside playing and hear this noise, and once you hear it once or twice you have no doubt what it is – it sounds like a freight train as it comes down the mountain,” Smith said. “You’d turn around and look up and one of the chutes would be coming loose.”

If you’re indoors, you often don’t hear the avalanches; if you do, that means you’ve built your house too close to the avalanche chute.

But Ophirites are used to planning around extreme winter conditions: Some may leave vehicles on the other side of a normal avalanche path, and then walk, snowshoe or ski out if necessary. San Miguel County workers will also trigger avalanches before they get too loaded up. People in Ophir will sit on their porches with their cameras and phones ready to capture the slide.

Smith described one historic spring slide, the one of ’56, as told to him by an Ophirite neighbor who recently died at age 92. Winter avalanches, he says, are just fast, often descending at speeds of 200 mph. But spring slides move more like lava flows, with tremendous force and tons of water, and can snake around instead of being pulled straight down by gravity.

“At that time, there was a mercantile at the east end of West Ophir, and this slide came right down towards it,” Smith said. “It didn’t destroy the mercantile but pushed the whole building across the street towards the river, a good 100-150 yards down slope. There it sat until spring came, and the miners rediscovered it under the snow.”

Although that slide happened before Smith was born, he grew up around the miners and ranchers who used to populate the Ophir Valley until the early ’80s.

“Those miners kissed their spouses goodbye and went into their little ant holes, working in really dangerous conditions hundreds or thousands of feet under the ground,” Smith said.

The miners forged a sort of brotherhood with each other while working together underground.

“Forevermore, they had this bond that they all shared, and if someone got hurt or maimed or killed, the rest of the community would marshal together and make sure that person’s family was taken care of,” Smith said. “It was a beautiful thing to see during childhood.”

Today, all the miners who embodied the spirit of old Ophir are dead and gone, and Smith is one the “last of the Mohicans,” as he calls the people his age who grew up there.

As the area ceased being a mining-driven economy, a culture of backcountry skiing steadily grew in Ophir. The most avid might rise at 3 a.m., boot-pack up the mountain and then ski down into town again around 9 a.m. Just like the miners did, they love the flora and fauna, the sunrises and sunsets and vistas. And although it’s not a livelihood, it is a dangerous way of life – Ophir lost two fathers in 2019 who died skiing in the back country.

Besides skiing enthusiasts, modern Ophirites include artists, craftspeople, world-class athletes and climbers, and those working seasonal jobs. Among those who now make Ophir their home is Valerie Sloan, who works for the Telluride Medical Center and EMS fire department, as well as the planning and zoning committee of Ophir. She’s also the mother of two young children, a demographic that has been growing steadily in Ophir for the last 15 years.

“You have to be careful because of the extremeness out here,” Sloan said about raising kids in the wilderness that is Ophir. She and her husband have conversations about risk management with their kids and send them out to play with walkie-talkies. One of the scariest parts of winter for her – never mind the avalanches – is the sledding, which happens in the middle of the roads in town.

“You can sled from East Ophir a mile down and then walk home,” Sloan said. “You have to be really careful about your kids’ sledding etiquette, and you have to know how to crash appropriately into the snowbank. And if you see a car, you don’t go.”

The Sloans have a greenhouse and solar panels, and both of them hunt for meat. Yet they also burn wood and propane, shop on Amazon, and end up driving hours to get major groceries.

“We live in this pristine, beautiful place, but our carbon footprint is bigger than most city peoples’, and part of me feels a bit contradictive,” Sloan said. “The kids think that everything comes from the UPS driver.”

Ophir does have its own post office, though, which was established three years before the town was. Little more than a wooden shack, locals claim it is the smallest manned post office in the United States. Natalie Grooms started working at the Ophir post office in May 2019 as a way to meet people and get closer to the community.

“People will come from all over the world to get their postcards stamped from Ophir,” Grooms said, “so I met people from Japan, Germany, Scotland, India, Texans in their jeeps – it was very eclectic.”

The tiny post office is split into two halves, housing the 200 post office boxes and the workspace for the mailperson, split by a half door. Grooms would bring her cat with her to work, and the cat and the neighbor’s black dog would bask in the sun outside in each other’s company. Every once in a while, Grooms said, a huge bear would cross the road, and deer would peep up from the nearby riverside.

Not even this idyllic vignette could escape a smattering of drama, though – just a few years before Grooms started, Telluride was planning to shut down Ophir’s post office.

“Ninety percent of the town wrote handwritten letters that year to save the post office,” Grooms said. “None were typed – some were two pages, some were two sentences: “Do not close this. I’m not going to Telluride to get my mail.”

Ophir has been through many stages in its life. East Ophir was once owned by John Wayne, and the entirety of Ophir was practically a ghost town in 1997, with only two registered residents. But today, just as the tourists come from all over, so do modern Ophir citizens, making it a very diverse, unique, eclectic town for how small it is.

Harley Brooke-Hitching has lived in Ophir full time since 2010, after running a business in Bangkok and receiving an education in England (her motherland), France, Italy and America. She’s lived in Amsterdam, New York, Chicago and Telluride, and she now runs a dog boarding business on her 60 acres. She plans to be in Ophir forever.

Among her acreage, Brooke-Hitching owns a former mining claim with an old mill site. When she purchased it, the devastation from the mining days was dramatic – mine tailings from the processed ore were 5 feet deep in some places, and the contaminated powder and muck was often bright yellow. It took the EPA four years to do a full restoration, but the river is clean now, and trees, wildflowers and grasses are growing on top of the 100-foot pile of contained remnants.

The general consensus is that you have to be a special breed to live in Ophir year-round. Avalanches may cover the road, and people may just walk over them. The types who thrive there are the ones who can deal with, or even enjoy, the really nasty, windy winters.

When asked if growing up in the Ophir valley helped form his character, Smith paused, and gave a wry chuckle.

“My childhood was like living in a Norman Rockwell painting every day,” he said. “Darling, I have so much character.”

If anything speaks to the character of a truly dedicated Ophir citizen, it’s this story about a mailman of decades past who was delivering the mail on his bike and was buried in an avalanche. He was found in the spring, with the mail sack.

“What a man!” Grooms said. “I was told he was as dependable as time itself, until he wasn’t.”

But legend has it that his karma is still out there, giving good magic to those who brave the valley.