Dinner & AirBnB in Ridgway

Colorado Travelog #17
Telluride, CO - Monday, 4 Jul 2022, 9pm

Whew. It has been a long day! We started the morning in Grand Junction, hiked Devil's Kitchen in Colorado National Monument, then drove to Telluride. In Telluride we 4x4'ed/hiked Bridalveil and Ingram Falls, and hiked Cornet Falls. By the time we finished all that it was going on 7pm, we were still 45 minutes away from Ridgway, where we've got an AirBnB for the next 2 nights, and we hadn't had dinner yet. Oh, and Ridgeway is a small town where few things are open late normally, and it's the 4th of July so schedules are different.

As I drove from Telluride back to Ridgway, around the flank of Mt. Snuffleupagus, Hawk checked on her phone for what eats would be open. One option after another was closed. Not that there were a lot of options to start with, as Ridgway is a small town. We ended up at a pizzeria that was closing minutes after we arrived. The staff told us we were welcome to dine outside. Oh, no, make us eat on the patio in beautiful weather! (Plus with masking at zero in western Colorado we wanted to avoid dining indoors wherever possible.)

After dinner it was time to find our AirBnB rental.



"Walk to downtown!" the listing had boasted. Yeah, the place— a loft about a nearly abandoned store— was a block and a half off the main strip. That main strip, BTW, was only a handful of blocks long.

We took advantage of the walkable town to walk to the town's one grocery store to buy some drinks and snacks.



Inside, the condo is spacious. The main floor, a level above the store, has an open living room/dining/kitchen combination with a bathroom.



Upstairs, in the loft, is a king bed (off to the right in the photo above) and a reading area. Given that it's only a 2-person condo (because there's only the one bed) there's a lot of room to spread out here.

All in all, it's a nice place. If only it weren't 45 minutes away from where we thought it was.

FuckUPS, July Edition

A few weeks ago I ordered a package on Amazon. I knew the delivery was risky as soon as I saw the shipper sending it via UPS. UPS has at best a 50% success rate delivering to my address.

The package was scheduled for delivery on Friday, 7/1. UPS notified me with an email that the delivery had been completed around 10:30am... except there was never a knock at the door... and there was no package at the door, either.

Sometimes delivery drivers get confused with which door is which in our townhouse complex. I see UberEats/DoorDash/etc. drivers struggling a lot. UPS and FedEx are way better— because their drivers are pros— but it's not outside the realm of possibility that they'd make a mistake. So I checked around neighbors' doorsteps, too, but didn't see my package there, either. At that point I figured UPS delivered it to the wrong street... or just didn't deliver it at all.

Several days later I asked a neighbor to check if the package had arrived at our door. We were out of town after Friday so I couldn't check it myself. By Wednesday there was still no package. But when we came home on Sunday, nine days later... the package was at the doorstep!

Driving the Million Dollar Highway

Colorado Travelog #18
Ouray, CO - Tuesday, 5 Jul 2022, 1:30pm

Today is shaping up to be a crummy day, weather-wise. Rain is forecast in Telluride most of the day, and it was gloomy where we were staying in Ridgway, too. At lower elevations around the state it was hot and sunny; but up here in the San Juan Mountains it's like an island of suck in the sky. Thus we decided to visit Ouray today. Ouray's weather isn't any nicer; but at least Ouray is something new.



Ouray is one of several Victorian Era mining towns in Colorado. It was founded in the 1870s when silver was discovered in the mountains. Towns such as this grew quickly as miners flocked to the area.



The San Juan Mountains were forbidding, though, making travel— and commerce— in the area hard. A storied engineer, Otto Mears, was able to build roads through the mountains. It's said that his road from Ouray to Silverton, through the Red Mountain Pass at elev. 11,018' (3,358 m), cost $10,000 per mile to build— in the 1870s. It gained the moniker The Million Dollar Highway.

I'm not sure how the math works out on that.... It's only 23 miles from Ouray to Silverton, not 100, so it's not clear the road cost $1MM to build. Maybe it's from the tolls he collected? Or possibly it's from what it cost to fully pave the road later. Present-day US 550 follows basically the same route Mears blazed.



Among the many challenges of building this road 150 years ago was crossing Bear Creek. It flows through a narrow and almost vertical slot from high up in the mountains. Just below the road cut it pluges 200 feet over a rocky lip. The steel girder bridge you see above it in the photo is the modern road. In the 1870s the bridge was wooden planks. And it's where Mears placed his toll booth, as it was the hardest point in the road for anyone to sneak around.