Hurray for Ouray

(entry for 12/18/2024)

When we lived in Montrose, from 1949 to 1953, we spent a lot of time in the town of Ouray, 36 miles and about 45 minutes to the south. (A photo of the downtown area is at the head of this post.)

We didn’t spend a lot of time in the town itself, because there were too many exciting things just out of town. The first one of these that we discovered was the naturally heated swimming pool, which the town claimed was the largest such in the world. (Not even close! There’s one in Glenwood Springs, 176 miles to the northeast, that is at least three times as large, and even that one is far smaller than one in the country of Slovenia. But if you’re hidden away in southwest Colorado, you can claim such things and who is going to check up on you?)

Our Adventist Church youth group in Montrose went swimming there quite regularly, often on a Sunday when the crowds were small, or even on a Saturday night (they stayed open till 10). Two memorable things happened to me there. The first was that in the deep end of the pool, I almost drowned, for the first and only time in my life, when I was ten, when someone threw me in, thinking I could swim, which I couldn’t. And a year later I heard my first ever rock-and-roll song in a pavilion there, and watched a young girl (non-Adventist of course) dance to it.

The pool was strange in that the hot-springs water flowed in at one end (the shallow end, three feet deep) and flowed out at the other (nine feet deep and my almost-drowning spot). By the time it got from one end to the other, it was down to about warm-bath temperature. At the entry point, is was HOT! A few hardy souls went close to the inlet. Not me!

The admittance price was low, and we went often, both with and without the group. Some people were offended by the slightly sulfurous smell, but I hardly noticed it. The entire surface of the curved shape that held the water was rather rough concrete, so you couldn’t afford to do much walking on the bottom. (Which of course was not an issue at the nine-foot end.)

I was rather saddened the last time I was in Ouray (in 2008) to see that the pool was closed, and dry, with the concrete all covered with moss and algae. I was relieved to learn recently that the whole thing has now been dug up and excavated and replaced with a much larger and nicer (and smoother) series of pools, some hot, some merely warm, and with many different depths, to accommodate visitors of different ages (and various swimming abilities). No one of these new pools is as large as the old one was, but if you add them all up, the swimming area is much larger than the old one was. The price, of course, is no longer reasonable!

Here’s a recent pic, provided by the resort that now owns the pool. (It used to be owned by the city.)

The next thing to be excited about was the mountains. The town itself has an elevation of only 7,700 feet, but it is surrounded by mountains that range from 12 thousand to over 14 thousand feet. (The sixth highest mountain in Colorado, Uncompahgre Peak, 14,308 ft. can easily be seen from the pool.)

In the summer the mountains are gloriously green with evergreen trees, up to about the thirteen thousand foot level, which is known as timberline because above that trees won’t grow, and except for rock faces (of which there are many) that are too steep for trees to get a foothold. (In Colorado as a whole, the average elevation of timberline is about 11,500, but it’s considerably higher around Ouray, for climatic reasons.)

In the winter, the mountains are covered with snow, although the taller trees do poke through here and there. Down at the bases of the mountains, the roads are always plowed. Colorado has a lot of snowplows and they work overtime at the first sign of a storm. They leave just enough snow on the pavement itself for your snow tires or chains to get good traction and they don’t spray tons of magnesium chloride (so-called road salt) to melt the compressed snow that provides the traction. (They do occasionally spread sand on the steeper hills.)

The mountains attract mountain climbers and rock climbers in the spring, summer, and fall, but remain pristine in the winter.

It doesn’t snow just in the mountains, however. Ouray itself attracts its share of storms, and it isn’t unusual for the hot springs themselves, and the pools they heat, to be surrounded by layers of the white stuff.

The next big attraction in the area is Bear Creek Falls, just a few miles south of Ouray and about a thousand feet higher. That site (and sight) was covered in an earlier post called ‘Me and My Leper.’ (You can go there by clicking HERE.)

But the biggest draw, the one we went back to again and again, was Box Canyon. If you don’t know what a box canyon is, it’s defined as a square-sided gorge that is so narrow you feel as though you were in a tunnel, because you really can’t make out the sky, and you’re in deep shade. That’s certainly true of the box canyon at Ouray. It’s on private property, and there’s an entrance fee, but it’s definitely worth it.

There’s a creek called Box Canyon Creek that flows north out of the mountainous area just beyond Ouray. In the picture below, you can see the creek flowing toward you. At the bottom of the picture you can almost see the canyon itself, where the creek falls into it.

The next picture shows the waterfall as it jumps in two leaps down into the canyon, and the next picture after than shows the tunnel effect that the tall canyon walls produce.

The final picture, in keeping with the season of this post, is of the waterfall as solid ice, something that happens seldom but is well worth seeing if you have a chance. I couldn’t find a free uncopyrighted photo of the effect, but here’s a copyrighted one for which I was able to get permission to use in this post.

Copyright © Jon Fuller. Used by permission.

One last note on Box Canyon Falls. My last visit to the falls, accompanied by my daughter Cynthia, was also the most memorable, in that the sun illuminated the entire height of the falls without shining onto any other part of the canyon. The effect was spectacular, and we later learned that it only happens about once a year. We didn’t have a camera with us, and I’ve been unable to find a similar shot online, so you’re just going to have to imagine it.

Here’s what you need to picture: A narrow quartzite canyon a hundred and thirty feet deep. The canyon floor suddenly drops another two hundred eighty feet, taking the creek with it. The canyon is so narrow and deep that the sunlight almost never makes it to the bottom, but once a year, for about twenty minutes or so, the water, and only the water, gets the full force of the sun on it. The falls actually glows as if lit internally. 

We happened to be there at the right time on the right day. Hurray indeed!

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