Meet Dave C.

Dave...........a colorful, crusty character who can keep you entertained with stories of these mountains and the local lore.  He is a professional jeep driver and takes visitors on tours of many jeep trails above Ouray, Telluride and Silverton, complete with narration.  Take a trip into the mountains with Dave and you'll come back with Colorado stories that you'll remember and smile about for years.  And you'll also be glad you were with a professional driver when you see some of the white-knuckle dropoffs that exist along the jeep trails.

I first met Dave when he was the driver on a tour I took that went up Engineer Pass to Lake City and came back over Cinnamon Pass through Silverton.  Engineer Pass requires navigation of tight switchbacks and massive boulders.  On the initial ascent we came across an abandoned Jeep Wrangler that had partly gone over the cliff edge and it's fall was stopped by pine trees.  The trail was so narrow our vehicle could not get by.  So we waited.

Mountain Rescue came up and pulled the jeep back onto the trail.  We found out later that 2 college girls had tried to drive over Engineer in the dark the night before (insanity), missed a turn and went over the cliff edge.  Luckily they were unhurt.  The girls left the jeep behind and had to walk out.  They walked the entire 9 miles out of the mountains into Ouray in the dark in order to find help.

But back to Dave.  I was so taken with his tales of the mountains, mines and mining towns that I snapped several photos of him that day.  He seemed to be part of the very fabric of the hills and became the inspiration for a drawing I did of him gazing up into the mountains.   I entitled the following colored pencil drawing "Listenin' to the Rockies"

Now for some fun! Yankee Boy Basin

The stage is now set for me to make you feel at home in this corner of Colorado, even if you never have the chance to visit.  I plan to give you the "mountain experience" by taking you on a pictorial and video tour of the mountains, showing you all the great activities and major events that go on year round, and introduce you to some great characters!

You'll be one of the locals when we're through!

I had the great privilege of making the acquaintance of JeepsterGal a few years ago.  She is a frequent visitor to the San Juan Mountains and Ouray and is an avid jeeper.  She has taken video of many of the jeep trails in the area and posted them on YouTube.  Enjoy this little trip into Yankee Boy Basin above Ouray and make sure the sound on your computer is on!

Sometimes Things Get Tough....

Even in Paradise.  Now that I was here in Ouray I had to figure out how to make a living.  So listen up! This is important info for you if you are seriously thinking of relocating to Ouray or some other idyllic spot and have not yet retired.

Short and sweet:

• In my first profession I was a Medical Technologist, so I went to work at the smallish hospital in Montrose, CO, 35 miles away, working deep nights for a big pay cut compared to the Dallas job I left.

• I opened a gift shop called "Uniquely Ouray" in the Wright Opera House on Main St.  My shop was the tiny space on the far left.  The Wright Opera House was built in 1888 by Francis Carney, the builder of many of Ouray's more significant early structures.
• The shop never made much money because tourist season really only lasts 3-4 months in the summer.
• Long story short:  I basically worked 24/7 for a year until exhaustion drove me back to Dallas and back to the much higher paying profession of software development.
• But it all had a happy ending!!  I worked for a great Dallas company (and still do).  After a year the company gave me permission to telecommute since all my work was done on the computer.  So I made a beeline back to Ouray, bringing my job with me this time and have been successfully telecommuting for the last 10 years.

I gradually made changes: 

• I dispensed with the little black sports car and bought a respectable Toyota 4Runner which can climb into the mountains with no problems.
• I bought land near Dallas Divide, remarried, and built a house.  Things turned out so well and I'm grateful to whatever powers that be that made all this possible.

Fun fact to know:  Ralph Lauren is my neighbor!  No, really!  Well..........OK.........I own 2 acres of land and he owns 2 or 3 mountains.  And I've never met him and he has no idea I exist.  But still, technically, we're neighbors!

Arriving in Ouray

I had done it!  I had driven out of Texas and was arriving in Ouray, CO, where I intended to carve out a life.  There I was, driving into town in a rented U-Haul truck with 2 cats, a cockatiel, and towing my little black sports car.  The car had been quite the showstopper in Dallas but looked utterly ridiculous in the mountains where you need a 4WD, high clearance vehicle to avoid being impaled on a boulder.

There was the village.  Ouray.  Nestled in a tiny mountain valley, the whole town is only 6 X 9 blocks big and has a year round population of about 800 souls.

View of Ouray from Lookout Point

I was determined to burrow into my new home town and spend my days basking in the serenity of those old mountains.  I managed to purchase a mobile home and had it moved to a lot right on the edge of the Uncompaghre River, just feet from a sheer cliff that rose into the sky.  Heaven. The river is a narrow, swift waterway that is powered by snow melt.  Every night I was soothed to sleep by the sound of the river racing by my window and awoke to the same "lullaby."  The purchase of a mobile home was an affordable way to get "my foot in the door" of this little town.  It wasn't much, but it was mine and I loved it.

Then I began to get acquainted with the other residents of this quaint Victorian town, and it was just the beginning.  Meet my new neighbors :)

Black bear cub

Mule deer, so called because they have gigantic ears not

unlike a mule, and they are much larger than white tail deer.



The Million Dollar Question

I was walking down Main St. in Ouray this past Saturday when a young couple stopped me.  They both had that magical glow and huge smiles that often characterize visitors to this area.  They asked me how to pronounce the name of the town.  It's your-ray', accent on the 2nd syllable.

They had JUST arrived in town after driving over the infamous Red Mountain Pass.  Yes, Ouray really is on the other end of this pass in the distant valley seen below.

Red Mountain Pass between Silverton and Ouray, known as The Million Dollar Highway

The couple was clearly enamored of the San Juan Mountains and the town of Ouray.  They bombarded me with questions on what to do, what to see, where the natural hot springs pool was, where to eat, etc.  They looked positively transfixed with the beauty that surrounded them.  And rightly so.

Ouray Street Scene

And then came the question.  The million dollar question.  "How do you get to live here???"  I burst out laughing.  That's exactly the same question I asked people on the street, shop proprietors and anyone who would listen back in 1995 during my first visit to the area.

The answer to that question is, in a word, "creatively!" 

Stay tuned: More of my own story coming up.

Fun fact to know: In the book, "Atlas Shrugged", there was a hidden little mountain town called Galt's Gulch where the shakers and movers in society disappeared to after dropping out of the rat race.  That town was actually Ouray.  Ayn Rand spent a great deal of time in Ouray when writing that book and Ouray became the model for Galt's Gulch.

How it Began

Vacation, 1995.  I had the great fortune to visit the San Juan Mountains in SW Colorado, some of the most rugged mountains in the USA.  Majestic, serene, spiritual and home to a number of quaint old mining towns.  I fell in love when I first laid eyes on the village of Ouray, CO.  The Switzerland of America.   http://www.ouraycolorado.com/   I knew that somehow, sometime I simply had to find a way to live in Ouray.  And I didn't want to wait until I was old enough to retire.  That presented a big problem.  The town survives on tourism for about 3 months in the summer.  It's nearly impossible to earn a sustainable living year round.

Vacation ended and it was back to the madness of the corporate world that was Dallas, where I lived and earned my keep as a software developer.  One hot summer day in 1999, as I was sitting on N. Central Expressway during rush hour (which is more like sitting in a parking lot) spending the 2 hours it took to drive 15 miles to work, something in me snapped.

I had held the vision of living in the magical San Juan Mountains for several years.  Suddenly, that day on N. Central Expressway, the vision of Ouray loomed large.  I didn't know how I was going to make it happen, but I pretty much turned the car around and headed for SW Colorado  (after taking care of a few details, like quitting my job and packing my belongings into a U-Haul truck.)

Call me crazy, but I had spent a lifetime being totally reliable, responsible, providing for my kids, and was always the dependable one.  This was a real risk and completely unlike me.  The only thing I knew for sure was that people weren't meant to live on top of each other in gigantic cities and sit, trapped for hours every day in a vehicle going to and from an unfulfilling job.  Life is just too short.  So off I went and never looked back.