If you want to live in Silverton, Colorado, you have to be self-reliant. The town’s 622 full-time residents live 9,318 feet high in the mountains. Each winter, Silverton is cut off from the outside world for several months. 

It takes up to five days for avalanche teams with remote-controlled howitzers to bomb and clear snow from the high mountain passes surrounding Silverton. “We have to fend for ourselves,” said DeAnne Gallegos of Silverton. Gallegos moved into her grandmother’s Silverton house more than a decade ago. 

In 2022, about 480 inches of snow fell in San Juan County, almost triple the average annual snowfall of about 15 feet. Now, Silverton is boosting its self-reliance with the federal Energizing Rural Communities Prize, planning for energy independence even when the town is inaccessible by road. 

Phase I for Silverton Team GOLD’s prize jumpstarted community resiliency planning. “We want everyone to feel confident that when the next disaster comes, because it will, that we can fend for ourselves and survive and take care of each other,” Gallegos said.

Like most workers in a small mountain town, Gallegos wears multiple hats. She is executive director of the Silverton Chamber of Commerce, handles the town’s communications, and is San Juan County’s public information officer. 

San Juan County is the highest county in the United States, with a mean elevation of 11,240 feet. Only about 50 people live in the county outside the town of Silverton, which is less than 15 miles from mountains topping 14,000 feet.

“Living so intentionally close to Mother Nature was the best decision I personally ever made,” Gallegos said. She paddleboards with girlfriends in the summer and regularly sees moose, fox, and bears when tourism slows.

But during blizzards, not even emergency helicopters can reach Silverton. The electrical grid is unreliable, too. Power outages have been a “wake-up call” for the community, Gallegos said.

One of the community’s first steps toward resilience was installing a backup propane generator at the senior center, where residents can stay warm. “We have seniors who have oxygen and CPAP to be able to sleep at night,” said senior center manager Keri Metzler, who also serves as the county coroner. 

Half of Silverton’s $200,000 Phase II Energizing Rural Communities Prize will fund mini-grants to help individual households improve climate resiliency through better insulation, residential solar arrays, backup generators, and other projects. The community must plan for resiliency in infrastructure as well as energy usage. The Durango & Silverton Railroad, which was recently converted from coal, is a primary engine delivering tourists to Silverton. “We are not just responsible for 700 of us,” Gallegos said. “We are responsible for 2,000,000 points of contact, so that is putting a lot of stress and fracture on our aging infrastructure.” 

The other half of the funding  will be used for solar installation on a field of tailings from the former Gold King mine. The goal is to create a microgrid by connecting the solar field to a battery backup,  which can provide electricity to the whole community during an outage.

The site is close to a San Miguel Power substation and unexpectedly well-suited to solar. “It has gorgeous amounts of light through the canyon,” Gallegos said. “The way the mountains carve out, you couldn’t have asked for a better location.”

Like her neighbors, Gallegos is determined to ensure her small community is sustainable and can survive whatever the future holds, through self-sufficiency and their Goal of Less Dependence. “We are small,” she said. “But we are mighty.”

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, commonly called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden in 2021. The law will invest billions of dollars in federal funding into rural infrastructure, disaster assistance, high-speed internet, and more.