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Good Old Montrose

An agriculture and government town makes ready for a more upscale future

story and photos by Chinle Miller

Found in: | Outside | Our Towns |

Come on down to McDuck's and hava a cuppa mud with us," the cell phone crackled as I topped Cerro Summit, just east of Montrose, Colorado. "You can be an honorary member of the club today."
I'll have to admit to holding a bias against McDonald's, the kind of bias that comes with favoring potable coffee and ambiance, but there I now sat, kicked back and drinking what the muddy Uncompahgre River must taste like if it were boiled. It's not often that I get to hang out with oldtimers who meet daily to solve the world's problems, most of them retired engineers and specialists from the Department of Energy. They call themselves the Old Codger's Club, AKA the Liar's Club.
"You fellas ever hear the one about the two old buzzards?" asks a sparkly eyed, crinkly eyed fellow who looks a bit like an old buzzard himself.
"Yep, Harold, you told us that one last time we was in here, that was yestiday," replies another oldtimer wearing a beat-up straw hat with dried sweat for a band.
Harold ignores him, continues, "Well, this first old buzzard, he says, ?I got me a claim up by the Yellow Bird doghole, and I spent $200 gettin' a grubstake goin' . . .'"
Another fellow, chewing on a toothpick while twiddling with his cell phone, now looks up, snorts, and interrupts, "Joe's right, you told us that one yesterday, and they was crows, not buzzards."
"I ain't done yet," laments Harold. "How do you know this is the same joke?"
Just then, someone stops by and asks, "You fellows ain't tellin' no lies, are you?"
"Oh, no, sir," they nod solemnly, "Not us."
"That wouldn't be a lie, would it?" grins the fellow on his way out the door.
After a moment to contemplate the paradox of what just transpired, an ex-engineer named Smitty looks up (Smitty wears Bermuda shorts, somewhat ultra-liberal for this bunch, but they accept him anyway) and announces, "You hear about that new subdivision just approved? Over 500 acres, out by the Ute Museum. It's gonna be the size of a town all by itself. They're callin' it Blue Sky, a good name for it."
"This town's goin' to hell in a handbasket," grunts Joe.
"The only kind of change Joe likes is in his pocket," retorts Harold.
The Old Codger's club adjourns for the day, and I decide to drive out by the house on Chipeta Drive where I spent my high school years, a house built on what used to be the farm of Chief Ouray and his wife Chipeta, just up the road from the Ute Museum. I want to check out where the new subdivision will be.
Good old Montrose. The town was founded in 1882 (the Utes were ousted the year before) and originally named "Pomona," after the Roman goddess of fruit. Land sold for $1.25 per acre. Spring Creek Mesa, just west of the town, was laced with apple orchards, but the region eventually also grew potatoes and beans and onions and later, sugar beets, all made possible by an ambitious water project that diverted the Gunnison River water through a tunnel in the side of the Black Canyon, just east of town, then through a series of canals. The area was sagebrush before the life-giving water, a place where ranchers ruled the day. Cattle drives down Main Street were a common sight.
Growing up here, we called it the town with no soul - we considered it to be totally uncool with its farming sensibilities, though of course way cooler than the smaller neighboring farming town of Delta. I once visited the Scottish version of Montrose, marveling at the differences between our little aggie town near the towering San Juan Mountains and their town, held together by old decaying buildings. Soul or no soul, I decided I'd take our version any day.
But we've all wondered what the town would be like if it hadn't scoffed at its chance to become the home of Western State College, which instead ended up in Gunnison. As an aside, Montrose did have a college in the late 60s (Western Colorado College) that closed after one graduating class. Mesa State now offers a limited curriculum.
The Montrose of my youth was a place where spring was marked by the song of red-winged blackbirds, where balmy summers were spent rafting on Chipeta Lakes or hiking the high country, where autumns were unmatched for their show of color and poignant sweet air swept down from the big peaks, and where the winters were dependably mild, with skiing in Telluride only an hour or so away. Most of Telluride's runs were beyond our abilities, but saying we went made us feel superior to our Deltoid neighbors. Not a bad place to grow up, soul or no, but pretty boring most of the time. Our parents liked it that way, at least as far as we kids were concerned.
Those same qualities (mild climate, rich soil, beautiful scenery) also drew the Utes to Montrose (long before it was Montrose, of course). The "Incomparable Uncompahgre Valley" (as the local chamber touts it) is now being discovered by the rest of the world, resulting in the kind of explosive growth represented by the Blue Sky subdivision. The town lies in the middle of the fertile valley, with some of the world's most scenic mountains on the skyline, hinting of verticality and high adventure, ragged ridges and extreme peaks to be climbed or simply admired from a pastoral stronghold for the less adventuresome.
Or . . . used in marketing campaigns to lure people into purchasing your newly approved subdivision. No backdrop like the San Juans. Just flip through anything to do with Montrose - chamber of commerce brochures, real estate ads, golf come-ons, you'll see those big peaks there, silently selling, selling, selling - and from a comfortable distance - not like Ouray or Telluride or even Durango, where you have to buy down coats and sheepskin boots and actually shovel snow - nope, not Montrose, the perfect retiree community, where you can have the beauty of mountains with none of the mess, enjoying that very photogenic fourteener, Mount Sneffels, while tooling to the new supersized Wal-Mart. Or Walgreens. Or Home Despot. Or Applebees. Or Starbucks. Or Chilis . . . .
And it appears the list of "ors" is just going to keep growing, potentially stretching some day all the way to the little town of Ridgway (if only there weren't a damn dam in the way - but it's built on a geologic fault, so who knows . . .). Currently, a new shopping mall is scheduled to be built in one of the most bucolic pastures on earth, next to the Uncompahgre River, a pasture that now is home for a few cattle, lots of deer, occasional bald eagles, and a restful place for eyes sick to death of the latest big-box-whatever just approved by the city council. That group seems to be marching to the same drummer that plays the drumroll when big corporations announce their latest record-breaking profits.
"We call it the Tellyride effect," says a family friend (who asked not to be named for reasons that will become obvious). "Montrose was always a quiet kind of conservative town B.T. (Before Telluride), then Tellyride took off, and now it's suffered the fate of other ski-town bedroom and supply communities, like Glenwood Springs (Aspen), Eagle (Vail), etcetera ad nauseum. And B.T., you could buy about any house in town for under $50,000, but now Montrose is beginning to have million-dollar homes. Second verse, same as the first. The ski area got it started, now retirees are keeping the ball rolling. Montrose is now a frantic high-energy town going nowhere."
My friend is a farmer, his family owning 200 acres of prime real-estate on top of the very desirable Spring Creek Mesa, just to the west of town and with the best views in the area of the San Juans. He and his neighbor, who owns another 200 acres, carry on the farming tradition, even though realtors drool on their doorsteps and the spector of rising property taxes hangs over their future.
"But get this," he continues, almost yelling over the noise of a Lear jet taking off from the airport north of town, "I was just served with papers to appear in court for arson. My neighbors put vinyl siding on their garage, which backs my irrigation ditch, and it melted while I was burning the ditch. My family's owned this farm since 1965, and we've burned that ditch every spring since then. The house sells to someone retiring here from Greeley, he puts on vinyl siding, and I go to court. But if I'm an arsonist, this whole county's full of 'em, cause there's lots of farmers here, and they all burn our ditches." (The case was later dropped after my friend paid $900 to re-side the garage, but the hard feelings have yet to be dropped, last I heard.) Second verse, same as the first concerning these kind of stories and what used to be called the "New West" before it all got to be the same old song.
When my family moved to Montrose in the mid-sixties, it was pretty much an agriculture and government town, with the Bureau of Reclamation the major employer (later renamed the Department of Energy). The Curecanti Project (now renamed the Aspinal Unit) was in full-swing, the dam-building frenzy of the BuRec at its peak, with Blue Mesa, Crystal, and Morrow Point dams all choking the Gunnison River, pumping electricity into the Glen Canyon power grid.
The BuRec provided good jobs and the community was glad for the stability that accompanied Montrose being the headquarters for the project. I have a high school photo of myself in the headquarters building standing in front of a huge bank of computerized weirdness in the control room, like something out of an old Woody Allen movie. The juxtaposition of BuRec engineers and sugar-beet farmers was also like something out of a movie, but they all got along. Some of the BuRec fellows, like my dad, even helped with the sugar beet harvest by driving trucks on weekends, at least until the sugar beet market bit the dust.
Now, those BuRec fellows are retired, the sugar beet farmers are growing Olathe Sweet Corn and Coors barley, and, along with retirees from the Front Range and California, Montrose now has a sizeable group of newer inhabitants - workers (mostly illegal) from Mexico, the majority who work in construction and agriculture and support services, many commuting daily to Telluride. Some of these workers have been here a decade or longer, but most are recent arrivals, drawn by need - ours and theirs. The lower-rent parts of town are rapidly becoming home to stores with Spanish names that cater to old-country workers.
Back on Chipeta Drive, I realize I've fortuitously forgotten about the existence of Cobble Creek Golfing Community, which backs immediately on our former back yard. The greens focus on that ever-present San Juan view. It all used to be the Collins Farm, but is now Collins Drive (among more fancier or fanciful names), and across the street is Chipeta Pointe (the "e" represents another 100k or so of equity), a small horsey subdivision created by our former neighbors, who decided to cash in. Nobody really blames them. Over the last decade, Montrose County has lost over 100,000 acres of agriculture land, according to a report from the Environment Colorado Research and Policy Center.
But Montrose has always been a regional center of sorts, and, as such, business has always been king. One can't be sure if the rampant development being permitted is from that historical mindset or out of complete loyalty to private property rights, a legacy of the town's western heritage.
The recent redesignation of the Black Canyon National Monument into a national park was a big step for the local chamber, which lost no time incorporating this "new" asset into its marketing efforts. The Black Canyon, a breath-taking gorge over 2,000 feet deep in places and also a mere 40 feet wide at its narrowest, can get boring pretty quickly (similar to the Grand Canyon, where the average tourist visit lasts four hours), spectacular as it may be. Unlike parks such as Canyonlands, there isn't much to do at the Black Canyon unless you're into very steep hiking (I once slid 2,000 feet down to the bottom in a couple of hours, camped in a what felt like the Era of Dinosaurs, then spent most of the next day climbing back out). But if you're a big-wall climber, it's paradise. Local Jimmy Newberry pioneered many of the big-wall climbs, giving them names such as the Hallucinogen Wall, reminiscent of how the students of his high-school era dealt with their boredom and ennui.
Now the more with it students hang out at the Coffee Trader, one of the few places in town having that ambiance that McDuck's lacks. Step into the Coffee Trader (located on West Main in an old historic house) and you could be in a town with real panache. There, unlike the new Starbucks on the ever-morphing South Townsend (where a recent study reports that four traffic accidents occur every day), one feels like there actually could be a sense of community in Montrose.
In fact, Montrose does have a number of communities, besides the ever-growing subdivisions, that is. There's definitely a strong Hispanic/Mexican community, and the Cinco de Mayo Festival celebrates a heritage that goes back to the early sheep rancher days, as well as crossing over into the traditions brought by the newer-comers. Other communities include a strong gardening contingency (mostly retirees), which has created botanic gardens that provide a magical foreground to the distant San Juan Mountains. And then there's the ballooning community, which has created something cool from hot air - the Lighter than Air Balloon Affair and the Black Canyon Balloon Festival. And don't forget the community of crazy kayakers who come to Montrose from as far away as Moab to kayak the waves of the South Canal (strange but true), part of the region's extensive irrigation system.
And though the Black Canyon may be too extreme for the general hiker, Montrose is central to plenty of other places, of which the San Juans reign premier. The Uncompahgre Plateau, just west of its namesake valley, is cut with over a dozen drainages, many which form intriguing canyons, such as Dominguez, Roubideau, and Potter, and each can provide days or weeks of hiking and exploring (or mountain biking, including the Tabeguache Trail, which stretches to Grand Junction, bypassing Delta).
And just under Warner Point, the extreme northernmost height above the Black Canyon, lies Red Canyon and what locals call Little Moab, the latter a huge outcropping of Entrada sandstone fins and whalebacks that make for great exploring. And behind all that, the Gunnison Gorge makes for some of the West's best rafting.
Closer to town, Sunset Mesa, known to locals as the Hogback, is now home to an 18-hole Frisbee golf course, and Montrose has at least four golf courses: Cimarron, Black Canyon, Cobble Creek, and the new very pricey Bridges at Black Canyon.
But in spite of all the changes, some things stay the same. Perhaps one of the things that best epitomizes Montrose is the Star Drive In, owned by the same family (the Devries) since the 1950s. It's one of only 400 in the nation and 11 in Colorado. People come for miles to sit in their convertibles and eat caramel popcorn under the big sky, which also happens to be the name of one of the other eleven - Delta's Big Sky Drive-In - to which we'd often sneak away, just to get outta town.

Originally from Colorado, Chinle Miller writes from the wildlands of Colorado and Utah, while also working as a part-time archaeologist.