Rita the Rock Planter is a giant troll sculpture built entirely from recycled wood by Danish artist Thomas Dambo, kneeling on a hillside between the old mining towns of Victor and Cripple Creek, Colorado. She’s on her knees, patching holes left behind by 19th-century gold miners, and you have to hike a short, rocky trail to find her — she’s not visible from the road.
Who Is Rita the Rock Planter?
Rita is a troll created by Thomas Dambo out of recycled junk, resting on her knees and filling in the holes left by careless Colorado miners. She’s built from scrap lumber, old fence boards, and whatever salvageable wood Dambo and his crew could scrounge up locally, all held together in his signature style: an enormous, expressive face and body assembled almost entirely from things other people threw away.
She isn’t some ancient legend somebody stumbled across. Rita the Rock Planter was unveiled on August 4, 2023, near an old 19th-century gold mine. That timing matters, because it puts her right in the middle of a real place with a real history — the Cripple Creek Mining District, one of the richest gold camps the American West ever produced.
Why Is She Kneeling and Patching the Ground?
The story behind Rita isn’t random. According to the artist himself, Rita is next to an old gold mine from the mid-to-late 1800s where people would come with pickaxes and dig holes trying to search for gold ore, and she took a nap back then and woke up recently to notice small holes in the mountain. In Dambo’s telling, she worried a squirrel or a human might fall into one of those holes and get hurt, so she’s now covering them up so nobody gets injured.
It’s a sweet, kid-friendly fable on the surface. But the artist never explicitly said the sculpture references trying to fix disruptions humans create for the earth, though with the Cripple Creek and Victor gold mine as the backdrop, it’s hard not to connect the two. Dambo himself put it more plainly in an interview: he said he couldn’t do the interview without the gold in his camera and microphone chips, but that we all have to take responsibility and leave the world at least as good as when we entered it. That’s basically the whole thesis of his troll project in one sentence — not anti-mining, just pro-accountability.
The official plaque version of her story is even more poetic. Per Dambo’s own writing on the sculpture: “A hundred suns is how long a nap takes for the trolls. When Rita woke again, her mountainside was full of holes. The humans must have dug them in their search for shiny rock. But someone could fall in, so Rita went to tidy up.”
Rita Isn’t Colorado’s First Dambo Troll
If the name Thomas Dambo sounds familiar, it’s because he’d already made his mark in Colorado once before. In 2018, Dambo installed “Isak Heartstone,” a 15-foot-tall troll made of foraged sticks and recycled wood, on the outskirts of Breckenridge. That sculpture became a minor legend in its own right, complete with local lore and, oddly enough, a reggae song written about it.
Rita is his second Colorado troll, but she’s part of a much bigger body of work. Rita the Rock Planter is Dambo’s 119th troll sculpture, and his mythical creations currently reside in 17 different countries around the world. He’s not slowing down, either — Dambo is known for his troll statues in forests around the world and hopes to eventually build 1,000 across the globe; so far he’s built 119.
Rita went up fast, too. She was completed on August 3, 2023, with more than 100 volunteers helping construct her out of 100% recycled wood. Building at nearly 10,000 feet isn’t easy work, and her frame went up in just 12 days, assembled by a team of volunteers at that elevation.
How Did a Danish Artist End Up in Victor, Colorado?
The whole thing reportedly started, fittingly, over drinks. The idea began at a bar, or at least that’s how one of the organizers remembers it, though the details are a little blurry. Two Victor residents co-founded a nonprofit called the Gold Camp District Impact Group, or gcDIG, back in January 2023, and spent winter nights scheming over drinks about what to do with it.
Bringing in a world-renowned troll artist wasn’t cheap or simple. Trolls aren’t free — gcDIG was trying to raise about $100,000 by the end of the year and had barely had time to form a fundraising plan, but both sides were enthusiastic enough to agree to a discount and a payment plan. It worked out because Dambo actually liked the place. He and his manager visited Victor in the winter and immediately fell in love with the town, and both sides wanted to make the troll happen.
The payoff for the town has been real. The owner of the Gold Camp Cafe and Mercantile in nearby Cripple Creek estimated about a 50% bump in business since word about Rita got out. For a small former mining town trying to reinvent itself, that’s not nothing.
How Do You Get to Rita the Rock Planter?
Part of the fun of Dambo’s trolls is that he doesn’t make them easy to find — that’s intentional. Keeping the specific location a secret is part of the trolls’ allure, since Dambo wants people to take hikes and work to find his art, which hopefully attracts smaller crowds and less trash.
That said, Rita’s general location is well documented now. You can hike the Little Grouse Mountain Trail, a trailhead located one mile west of Victor on Highway 67, where you’ll find a dirt parking lot on the left, followed by a short, rocky stroll of about 0.25 miles to reach Rita. Atlas Obscura describes a similar approach: the trail to Rita is roughly a quarter mile from a parking lot at the top of the hill, accessible by a short gravel road, or you can add an extra half mile each direction by hiking up from the Little Grouse Mountain Trailhead at the bottom.
Don’t underestimate the terrain. One visitor’s advice is worth repeating: the path to Rita is filled with jagged rocks and is a bit steep, so sturdier shoes are a must — sandals are a problem. The reward for the scramble is a genuinely striking setting. She sits out in the open on Little Grouse Mountain near two of the oldest mining towns in the West, with no trees to dwarf her and plenty of room to impress. And at roughly two stories tall, she’s technically the tallest of the Colorado trolls, even kneeling down.
Best of all, this is a free stop. Rita the Rock Planter is free to visit and open to the public.
Worth the Detour
Rita isn’t hiding in a dense forest like some of Dambo’s other trolls — she’s out on an open, windswept hillside where the whole gold-camp landscape she’s supposedly cleaning up is spread out in front of her. That context is what makes her different from a lot of roadside novelties. She’s not just a big wooden face for photos, though she’s plenty photogenic. She’s sitting inside the actual history she references, on ground that was quite literally dug up and left full of holes.
If you’re already in the Cripple Creek or Colorado Springs area, the detour to Victor is short, and the payoff — a nearly two-story recycled-wood giant patching up an old mining claim with her bare hands — is the kind of thing that’s genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it. Bring real shoes, take the short trail, and go say hello to Rita while she keeps tidying up after us.
NOTE TO THE ADVENTURER: This guide is meant to spark curiosity for what lies beyond the horizon — not to serve as a guarantee. Roads fall into disrepair, buildings are torn down and rebuilt, and properties change hands; 'tis your responsibility to do your own research before setting out. Always heed local and regional law, and always respect ground that isn't your own. Take every entry here as a suggestion, not a decree. This guide's contents were gathered with the aid of artificial intelligence, and like any scout, it will from time to time lead you astray. You assume all risk in following its counsel, and neither this blog nor its author is liable for any loss, injury, or misfortune that results.
