You simply have to love this vibrant mountain town.
Frisco was first home to the Ute Indians who spent their summers hunting game and fish in this gorgeous valley. Frisco’s high elevation and deep snowpack prevented settlement for centuries. The first settlers were called “Mountain Men” by the local native americans, making their living largely from beaver pelts. Between 1810 and 1840, trappers and Utes were the area's only occupants. The beaver population plummeted by over-hunting and the pelts went out of fashion, leaving the Valley once again largely unsettled.
That changed in the late 1850s with the discovery of gold just to the southeast. Miners began searching every river and stream in the high country. They soon discovered gold in the waterways surrounding Frisco. The town of Frisco officially began in 1873 by a transplanted Swede named Henry A. Recen who built a cabin west of this spot and began hard rock mining for silver. The gold in local streams was quickly mined, but determined miners like Recen went deep into the earth searching for large veins of silver in the rock.
Recen sent to Sweden for his brothers and soon there was an influx of other miners to town. On the footsteps of the miners came those businessmen seeking to make their own fortunes providing goods and services to residents, including saloons, hotels, dry goods stores and a post office. Two railroads laid track to Frisco and the town was incorporated in 1879. Until the depression of 1910, the mines around Frisco were shipping 50 tons of gold and silver to the Denver Mint each day. Falling prices and the depletion of high-grade ore created a slump in the local economy.
Frisco's revival centered on the abundance of a resource, which had been overlooked and cursed for decades – snow. With the opening of Colorado's first ski resort at Arapahoe Basin in 1946 and later Breckenridge, Copper Mountain and Keystone, Frisco took advantage of a surge of recreation seekers while retaining its historic feel well into the late 20th century. Although residents enjoyed indoor plumbing after 1955, they didn't have a sewer system until 1965. Town streets were finally paved in 1974.