Poudre City

Poudre City is a ghost town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in northwestern Larimer County, Colorado. Its story is brief and dramatic: founded in 1890 around a gold reducing stamp mill, the entire town was wiped out less than a year later when the Chambers Lake dam failed on June 10, 1891, sending a catastrophic flood down the Poudre Canyon.

Visitors today will find almost nothing — a solitary chimney from the stamp mill is the sole surviving remnant of the settlement. It is a stark but evocative marker of how completely the flood erased what had been built there.