Ouray's not Hollywood

Evening, Campers! It's Silver Cliche' here again with you. We are here for night #2 at Ridgway State Park in Ridgway, Colorado. Before I talk about our day, I must make an apology to the people. Ridgway. In last night's blog I referred to this place as Ridgeway, not Ridgway. The later is correct. I hope they will understand and forgive my confusion.  Assumed that this place was named after the numerous mountain ridges in the area. Apparently it was named after a disease of aquarium fish. Who could have guessed? My apologies. (Don't bother googling that one... I made it up... I think it was named after a typographical error... or an unfortunate case of bad penmanship in Denver... but is seriously is Ridgway... you can look that up)

So, back to Colorado and camping. It was nice to have electric hookup again and two full propane cylinders (we tanked up yesterday at a Conoco in Ridgway). That allowed me to say to Mrs. C' and the pups "set the heat wherever you want... we are not running on batteries tonight, so we can't run out of power for the furnace." It was about 40 outside, but 65 in and we all slept well despite the occasional sound of rain and sleet on the skylight domes of the trailer.

It was forecast to be generally yucky today and unfortunately the weatherman got it mostly right. There was a strong possibility of us getting "trailer fever", so after breakfast and some housekeeping (hey, we still have a house to run and bills to pay and such... this seemed the time to attend to those drudgeries) we decided to head into town. No, not Ridgway, which would have been exciting enough... 10 miles down the road to the county seat... Ouray.

Let me talk about where we are. Ridgway and Ouray are both in Ouray county. If you were to divide Colorado into thirds north/south and east/west (think of putting a tic tac toe board on top of good old, square Colorado) then Ouray county lies near the middle of the lower left corner of the board. It is an area roughly the size of... oh... I don't know... probably Delaware. The population of Ouray county is 4,000 people. That's right, if the people were evenly dispersed across the land area, no two of them would be able to see or hear each other. We are still on the west side of the continental divide (more on that Sunday when we will cross Monarch Pass at 11,000+ feet and cross the divide) and at about 7,500 feet elevation here at the campground. That means the Rockies are visible and at their most beautiful at sunset when the light from the west illuminates them. Here, let me show you a pic I took at about 5:00 PM local time... not yet sunset, but still beautiful illumination. This was taken about 100 yards from where we are camped.

You may not find it surprising that some people call Ouray "the Switzerland of the United States". You may find it even less surprising that those people work in some place called "the Chamber of Commerce". All needling of my professional colleagues in marketing aside, it is very beautiful here. The mountains are rugged, snow capped, tall, close and everywhere. 

With so many geographic challenges it is easy to ask why there is any habitation here. The answer was provided by Walter Huston in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" It's GOLD! In the late 1800s gold was searched for and found here on the west slope of the Colorado Rockies. Ouray grew as a mining center and a railroad head. The mining has slowed to a trickle and the last train left in the 1930s, but lots of wealth came out of this area in the decades centered around the 1880s. Two noteworthy mines together produced over 1 million ounces of gold bullion. At today's value of a few ticks over $1,200 per ounce that would be worth about one and a quarter billion dollars. 

Ouray today is a charming little Rocky Mountain town. If John Denver had lived longer I'm sure he would have eventually written a song about this place and we would all know the words. It's name is pronounced like the first word of the song "Hooray for Hollywood" but with the "h" sound dropped. Maybe John could have given us "Ouray's not Hollywood" as a contrast between his beloved, natural Colorado and tinsel-town. I can almost hear the chorus saying "Its limos are mine carts / Its stars are in the sky / Its people are earth bound / with a Rocky Mountain high / No Ouray's not Hollywood / It's closer to heaven by at least a mile".

You may remember the Silver Cliche' AuthenticIty Test (SCAT). Ouray scores high. It has a couple of things going for it. First off, most of the buildings that lined its main street ... actually, it is Main Street... are the original, authentic 19th century structures. The entire Main Street section of Ouray is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district. The whole hog... rooter to tooter. Additionally several buildings are individually listed as historic places including the Wilson Opera House (I'm thinking some miners who struck it rich in the 1880s had a grand time chasing chorus girls in that place!) and a hotel or two. You can almost imagine Miss Kitty down at the saloon sweet talking Marshal Dillon (did he really never ask what was going on upstairs?) in this town.

Today, Main Street is paved but most of the side streets even in the center of town are gravel right up to the point the meet Main. There are restaurants, stores of various sorts from a 1930s throwback grocery store to a "mining and welding supply" business mixed in with tee shirt shops and western wear stores. Eclectic is the word. But it works here in Ouray. Although "dispensaries" are easy to spot throughout Colorado, with their "green cross" logo (like the symbol for European pharmacies or a nauseated version of the American Red Cross logo) or the distinct five fingered leaf, none was visible as we drove, then walked the 6 or 8 blocks of Ouray. Interesting. It takes a lot of money to muscle marijuana out of any place in Colorado. There must be a lot of money in tee shirts, sandwiches and mining supplies in Ouray.

And all around... literally on all four points of the compass... mountains. Here, let me show you a few shots of Ouray I took as we walked, shopped and ate there today.

So, tomorrow we are heading back to Ouray first thing. We've got a Jeep reserved for the day from a business in town. We were hoping to take it up and over Imogene Pass at 13,000+ feet and on to Telluride for lunch. However, Imogene Pass doesn't open until... July! I can only imagine it closes in September. Talk about a short season. When we reserved the Jeep, the folks there asked "So, where are you folks from?" I answered "Florida." They dug deeper "What part?" I shared "Vero Beach." Then came the punch line "We're from Jupiter." (No, not the planet... Jupiter, Florida about 30 miles south of our home). They own and operate a mountain Jeep rental business in Ouray for the few months it's habitable to Floridians then head home to warm up. Literally every person in town who asked us where we are from had a Florida connection. And everyone in town asks where you are from.

Hopefully tomorrow's blog will feature pics from Yankee Boy Basin which is passable now despite the fact that it's still frickin' winter here by our standards. I did ask, in anticipation "Are your Jeeps hardtop and does the heater work?" Yes on both counts.

Later...

SC'