OURAY COUNTY

January 17, 1974 – “And above, in the high thin blueness, the Bridge of Heaven on Horsethief Trail. Four hundred years of it – the plunder trail to heart’s desire. So for Coronado’s Spaniards and Wm. Ashley’s beaver hunters, for the miners and the stockmen and the utopian colonists, for tie cutters and ditchdiggers. So, too, for today’s vacationists and dambuilders and the purveyors who batten on them – there are, after all, more ways than one to skin either a cat or a continent,… that’s the hell of heaven: defining it to everyone’s taste. Somehow, though, it has to be managed. For there simply aren’t four hundred more years of plunder remaining, either in the Rockies or in the country as a whole.” Those were David Lavender’s words, from his book, “The Rockies,” quoted in Grand Junction at the recent wilderness hearings, by Bart Kohler, Denver, who spoke for Wilderness Society members in Colorado and Wyoming. Kohler told the Plaindealer that the “Bridge of Heaven” (above the amphitheater over Ouray) is included in the proposal for a larger area of wilderness than that proposed by the Forest Service.

40 YEARS AGO

January 19, 1984 – The Ouray City Council is considering proposing a 1 cent increase in Ouray’s sales tax as a means of providing revenue for improvements in the city and upgrading the city’s equipment. After an executive session following the council’s regular meeting Monday night, Mayor Jack Clark said that the increased tax, if approved by voters, would be in effect for perhaps a year at a time.

No definite decision on the matter has yet been made. Such an increase would increase the sales tax in Ouray to 7.5% up from 6.5% of which 3.5% is state sales tax. The possibility of increasing the sales tax was mentioned during the regular meeting as part of a discussion about what to do about the bridge at Third Avenue and Oak Street. The bridge is in poor condition and has a cracked abutment.

30 YEARS AGO

January 20, 1994 – Compromise is a word being used a lot in Ridgway this week. Representatives of both sides of the City Market issue basically agree that the Town Council issued a fair compromise when it gave Ridgway Land Company conditional approval on Jan. 12 to amend its planned unit development to allow construction of a City Market. “They took the middle path,” said Jorge Anchondo, who has been active in opposition to the City Market. “It’s a good compromise.” “It seems appropriate and fair to me,” said project developer Rob Hunter of Ridgway Land Company. “Most of it seems pretty do-able and stuff we’d like to see happen anyway,” Hunter added about the conditions imposed by the council.

20 YEARS AGO

January 16, 2004 – EDITORIAL: The key word in the neat interview with Gary Wild in the 2004 Ouray Ice Festival program, so it seems, was “pioneers.” A decade ago, Wild, Bill Whitt and Mike O’Donnell pioneered the concept of farming ice in the Uncompahgre Gorge and creating frozen walls which climbers could assault and ascend. It was a premise not dissimilar to that of the Kevin Costner character in “Field of Dreams” – build it, and they will come. The rest, we all know, is history, and we remain smack-dab in the middle of the Ice Park’s evolution. It began when the three pioneers gathered garden hoses and surplus showerheads, and cobbled together the plumbing to make the ice. It all worked. A couple years later, Jeff Lowe started the annual Ice Festival, and suddenly, Ouray’s once-moribund winter landscape came to life, courtesy of all those outdoorsy people with the rucksacks, down jackets and pointy things attached to their mountaineering boots. – David Mullings

10 YEARS AGO

January 16, 2014 – Red Mountain Pass will remain closed through Monday, Jan.

20, at least, as rocks continue to fall off the mountainside, following a series of rock slides that began Sunday evening.

According to Nancy Shanks, spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Transportation, the 200 feet of U.S. 550 roadway that was covered in debris at mile marker 90 was mostly cleared by Tuesday afternoon. However, the pass will remain closed for days due to continuing rockfall.

CDOT closed a 12-mile stretch of U.S.

550, from mile marker 80 to 92, around 7:30 p.m. on Sunday after a “great deal of rubble” poured across the roadway from approximately 900 feet above the highway just two miles south of Ouray. After the road was reopened at 9:11 p.m. on Sunday, a second rock slide closed the pass again at 12:40 p.m. on Monday. Debris continued to fall throughout the evening and continued through Tuesday morning, Ouray County Sheriff Junior Mattivi told the Board of County Commissioners during Tuesday’s meeting. According to CDOT reports, rocks measuring up to six inches in diameter and piles of rubble as deep as eight feet blocked certain parts of the road.