Back to Ouray

I hadn't been to Ouray in at least ten years, and I was curious to see if the little mountain town had changed. Cindy and I had spent an amazing time there once, on one of our many US travel adventures, and it had stuck with me ever since.

It's easy to see why. Ouray sits at 7,800 feet in a natural rock amphitheater in the San Juan Mountains, ringed by peaks so steep and close that the town has earned the nickname "Switzerland of America." It was founded in 1875 after prospectors found gold and silver in the surrounding mountains, and within a year it had swelled to 400 people and over 200 buildings, most of them log. The town is named for Chief Ouray, a Ute leader who was often called "The White Man's Friend" for the patience he showed as miners pushed into Ute territory. That patience came at a cost. Just two years before the town was platted, the Brunot Agreement forced the Ute people off the land entirely, clearing the way for the prospectors who founded Ouray.

Ouray also happens to sit on top of hot springs the Ute people used for centuries, calling the area "Uncompahgre," their word for hot water springs. And in one of those odd little facts that sticks with you, Ayn Rand said Ouray was part of her inspiration for Galt's Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. The Beaumont Hotel on Main Street has hosted Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Oprah Winfrey. And for six years in the 1980s, the town's mayor was Bill Fries, better known by his stage name C.W. McCall, of "Convoy" fame.

None of that history was on my mind when I pulled off the highway. I was just looking for a place to camp.

Angel Creek and Steve'O

I found a campground on the map a few miles up Route 360, just outside of town, that promised a spectacular setting. I turned in at Angel Creek Campground. Small place, maybe twelve sites. Right at the entrance was an information booth where you could pay for your site, and a sign saying that if you wanted hiking information, you should drive a mile up to the next campground and find the camp host.

His name was Steve. Steve'O, he told me. I didn't ask what the "O" was for.

He was blissfully, thoroughly stoned. I'd forgotten that pot is legal in Colorado now, and Steve'O was having the time of his life. I loved him instantly. I asked him about hiking, even though I had my doubts he'd hiked a day in his life. "Oh, just go over to that cabinet, open up the back, and you'll find all the information you want," he said. I opened it up. Nothing but brochures for local restaurants and tourist traps.

He came and sat down next to me, then handed me a giant rock that had been sitting on the table between us. He looked at it, then at me, beaming, like he'd just handed me something sacred.

"What is it?" I asked, smiling, playing along.

"It's from around here," he said.

"Okay. Is it some kind of crystal?"

"Yeah, I found it on my hikes."

I looked around and realized the whole table was covered in these rocks, the spoils of his many short forays into the woods around camp. Pleased with himself, he looked me dead in the eye. "This is the best place in the entire world. I love living here. I love doing this. I can't believe how lucky I am to be the camp host here." Then, earnestly: "You need to stay here. You need to just hike here. You need to just be here."

Stoned or not, he was right. It's not just gorgeous. It's the kind of place that doesn't really translate into words, no matter how hard I try here.

I asked how he'd landed the job. "Friend of a friend," he said. "Dream come true. Not really sure what I'm gonna do in October when the season's over. But I don't really care."

Then he told me about a secret waterfall just up the road. "Well, it's not really that secret. I tell everyone about it," he admitted. "It was secret to me, since I'd never heard of it before." There was some logic in that. He gave me directions to it that I don't think a single human being could actually follow, though I figured I'd give it a shot the next day.

Talking to him was enough to convince me to stay more than one night. I went back to my site and paid for two.

Dinosaur Tracks on the Trail

I'm so glad I did.

The next day, on a punishingly steep uphill hike, I passed a guy coming down with his dog, and he mentioned there were dinosaur footprints along the route, continuous tracks pressed right into the rock. Without him, I'd have walked right past them without knowing what I was looking at.

It turns out the mountains around Ouray hold one of the more remarkable dinosaur discoveries in the world. What I'd stumbled onto was the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Trackway, reached via the Silvershield Trail: 134 consecutive sauropod footprints stretching 106 yards, the longest continuous dinosaur trackway ever found. They were left by a single long-necked, plant-eating sauropod roughly 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic, and at one point the animal made a wide 270-degree turn, doubling back over its own path, a rare enough thing to see preserved in stone that paleontologists consider it a genuinely big deal.

The tracks were found by accident, back in 1958, by a ten-year-old local boy named Rick Trujillo, who'd been sent outside to play with his friends for the day. They noticed a series of oddly regular potholes in the rock and figured, correctly, that they had to be dinosaur tracks. Trujillo spent the rest of his life in Ouray, and decades later helped get the site properly studied and protected. The land had been owned by one family since 1945, who used to hike past the "potholes" without knowing what they were, sometimes letting their dogs drink out of them. It wasn't until 2021 that anyone realized what they actually were, and the U.S. Forest Service didn't purchase the land and open it to the public until April 2024.

West Gold Hill Dinosaur Trackway

There's something fitting about it. A stoned camp host handing me a rock like it was treasure, then a stranger and his dog pointing out something 150 million years older than either of us, on the same short trip. Ouray does that to you. It's a town built on what people found buried in these mountains, gold, silver, hot water, and now, footprints from something that walked here long before any of it.

I still haven't found that waterfall. Tomorrow, maybe.