How Victor earned the score

Let us meet Victor, Colorado

Victor sits in a bowl on the southern flank of Pikes Peak, at 9,708 feet, five miles from Cripple Creek and about forty-five minutes up the switchbacks from Colorado Springs. It calls itself the City of Mines, and it earned the name honestly. The richest gold mines of the Cripple Creek district, the Portland, the Independence, the Cresson, the Ajax, and the Gold Coin, stood on Battle Mountain just above the rooftops. At the turn of the twentieth century roughly 18,000 people lived here. The 2020 census counted 379. That gap, from a boomtown of eighteen thousand to a working population of a few hundred, is the whole story of Victor, and it is the fact every honest visitor number has to start from.

The town was founded in 1891 and incorporated by 1894 by the brothers Frank and Harry Woods, who struck the vein that became the Gold Coin Mine while digging a building foundation on their own townsite. Cripple Creek, five miles over the hill, was the district’s banking and management center, the place the mine owners lived. Victor was the working town, where the miners who actually went underground made their homes. Over its life the district pulled roughly 21 million ounces of gold from the ground, a haul worth more than 10 billion dollars in 2010 money. That wealth built the brick, and the labor that produced it built a hard union town.

What did not vanish was the built town. When a fire swept the commercial blocks in 1899, Victor rebuilt in brick, and because the economy never boomed again there was never money or reason to tear the brick down. The result is a turn-of-the-century streetscape that survives almost unaltered. The Victor Downtown Historic District, twenty-two acres of it, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. You can still find the Western Federation of Miners union hall with bullet holes from the labor wars of 1903 and 1904 in its facade, and the boyhood home of Lowell Thomas, the broadcaster who introduced Lawrence of Arabia to the world and who grew up in this camp. That authenticity, unstaged and unrestored into a theme, is Victor’s oldest asset. It is also, on its own, a hard thing to convert into overnight stays.

The reinvention: a troll on the hill

In January 2023 a handful of Gold Camp residents formed a nonprofit called the Gold Camp District Impact Group, or gcDIG, with a plain goal: breathe some economic life back into Victor and its neighbor Cripple Creek. Two of the founders, Jeff Hellner, who runs the Gold Camp Cafe and Mercantile, and Clint Pickett, had seen what a single Thomas Dambo sculpture had done for Breckenridge, where the troll Isak Heartstone had become one of the most photographed things in the county. Kim Lottig, whom Hellner had just brought on to direct the group, reached out to Dambo’s team to ask what it would take to bring a troll to a town of four hundred people.

Dambo is a Danish artist who describes himself as a recycled-art activist. He builds giant trolls out of scrap wood and discarded pallets, on the argument, in his words, that “trash should not suffocate the world, it should save the world.” By 2023 he had made more than a hundred of them across seventeen countries. He agreed to come to Victor at a discounted rate on a payment plan, and gcDIG set out to raise roughly $100,000 to cover it. Rita the Rock Planter, his 119th troll, went up on Little Grouse Mountain about two miles west of downtown. More than a hundred volunteers built her in twelve days, out of roughly two hundred recycled pallets, at an elevation near ten thousand feet. She stands twenty-one feet tall, which makes her the tallest of the Colorado trolls. She was finished on August 3, 2023.

The concept is site-specific in a way that matters here. Dambo’s story for Rita is that she noticed the holes the miners left in the ground more than a century ago, worried that a person or an animal might fall in, and knelt down to patch the earth and plant it back to life. In a town whose entire landscape is scarred by shafts and tailings, a giant troll gently repairing the damage of the gold rush is not a random whimsy. It reads as a comment on the place. That is the difference between a sculpture that could sit anywhere and one that belongs where it stands.

What one sculpture created

The honest caveat first: Victor has not published the kind of hard visitation and spending figures that larger troll towns have. There is no turnstile on a free hillside, and a town this size does not run a lodgers-tax dashboard. So the numbers here are directional, not audited, and the VIS treats them that way. What can be said is grounded in named sources. Jeff Hellner, who has the clearest view because he owns a business on the main street, estimated a roughly 50 percent increase in traffic to his establishment in the period after Rita was announced and installed. Local bartenders and shopkeepers described a steady stream of new faces asking for directions to the troll. The town leaned in: Victor added Rita to its official map, painted her likeness onto the welcome sign on Highway 67, and scattered colorful birdhouses through downtown to tie the sculpture’s world back into the streets where the money is actually spent.

That last move is the important one for a place like Victor. A troll two miles out of town, on its own, produces a parking lot and a photo, not an economy. The value only lands if visitors come down off Little Grouse Mountain and into the brick downtown, where the Victor Lowell Thomas Museum, housed in an 1899 building and named for the broadcaster who grew up here, the Gold Camp Cafe, the 1899 Bar and Grill, the Gold Camp Bakery, and the artists’ co-op can turn a free stop into a spent afternoon. Victor’s instinct to route the troll’s traffic back through its historic core is exactly the play a town this small has to run.

It also arrived on top of a real, if modest, existing draw. Victor Gold Rush Days, held every July, bills itself as the longest continuously running festival in Colorado, going back to 1895, with gold panning, a parade, and mine tours. The Vindicator Valley and Battle Mountain trails let visitors walk the historic mine workings directly. Rita did not create Victor’s tourism from nothing; she gave a town that already had heritage and hiking a single, shareable, contemporary reason to make the drive, and a hook that travels on social media in a way that a National Register plaque never will.

What the score says, and what is next

Victor’s composite Visitor Impact Score is 54, in the Emerging band, and the shape of the breakdown is more useful than the headline. The anchor itself is the strongest component: the Anchor Activity score of 73 reflects that Rita is a genuinely distinctive, free, on-brand draw with a clear tie to the town’s identity. That is the raw material a reinvention is built on. Almost everything else is held down by scale and remoteness, and the score is honest about it. Stay and Itinerary and Curb components sit low because a town of about 400 has thin lodging, limited services on the ground, and a short shoulder season at ten thousand feet where winter closes much of the high country. Web and Brand components are modest because a tiny town, plus a young nonprofit, has not yet built the digital footprint, the booking paths, and the consistent multi-channel identity that a destination needs. The Unique Hook multiplier of 1.01 is close to neutral: Rita is distinctive, but she is one of a growing family of Dambo trolls, including Breckenridge’s, less than two hours away, which slightly tempers her singularity within Colorado.

None of that is a verdict against Victor. It is a map. The upside case for a hidden gem is precisely a town where the anchor already works and the surrounding fundamentals are fixable. The near-term moves are unglamorous and well within reach: give Rita and the downtown a single, well-run website with clear directions and an itinerary that pairs the troll with the museum, the trails, and Gold Rush Days; help the handful of lodging and food operators show up online with claimed profiles and bookable options; and keep routing the hillside’s foot traffic down into the brick core where it converts. Victor cannot become a resort, and it should not try. What it can do is convert a single, well-placed, authentically local sculpture into a durable reason to drive up the mountain, and then make sure the visit is worth a full day and, eventually, a night. The score of 54 is not a ceiling. It is the starting line for one of the most promising small-town reinventions in the set.

Why other small towns should watch Victor

Victor’s lesson is the most encouraging one in this whole series, because Victor is the least resourced town running the play. It did not have a convention bureau, a marketing budget, or a population big enough to staff a festival without volunteers. It had a bar owner, a cafe owner, a new director, and a hundred neighbors willing to swing hammers for twelve days. Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, the flagship of this troll pattern, turned five Dambo sculptures into an estimated 100,000 first-season visitors and a Time World’s Greatest Places listing; you can read that Detroit Lakes case study here. Victor is the same idea at one one-hundredth the scale, and the early signal, a roughly 50 percent lift for main-street businesses, suggests the mechanism works even at four hundred people. If it can work here, on a scarred hillside at ten thousand feet, most towns have fewer excuses than they think.