Cortez, Colorado

Cortez is a town built to move water. Unlike the mining camps and rail stops that seeded most of Colorado, it began on Christmas Day 1886, when Matt Hammond hauled the first lumber onto the site to raise its earliest buildings. The town was laid out by M.J. Mack, engineer for the Montezuma Valley Water Supply Company, on land owned by the company's president, J.W. Hanna, and its purpose was blunt and practical: to house the men who would build the elaborate network of tunnels, ditches, and laterals needed to divert the Dolores River over a ridge and into the dry Montezuma Valley. By the spring of 1887, hundreds of men were at work on the new system. The town took its name from Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador — a piece with its county, named for the Aztec emperor Moctezuma. The gamble was that the valley's sandy red soil, once watered, would grow abundant crops.

The gamble mostly paid off. Once the valley was watered, it grew crops like alfalfa, potatoes, wheat, and beans, with cattle on the range and orchards down in McElmo Canyon. But the deeper history here dwarfs the town's own. Ancestral Pueblo people had settled the Mesa Verde region by around AD 600, building the mesa-top villages and, later, the cliff dwellings that President Theodore Roosevelt set aside in 1906 as Mesa Verde National Park — the first national park created to protect cultural heritage, holding nearly 5,000 archaeological sites and the great Cliff Palace. Cortez became the front door to all of it. Just south, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — descendants of the Weeminuche band — established their reservation in the 1890s, headquartered at Towaoc beneath Sleeping Ute Mountain.

Water kept shaping the place right into the modern era. The original 1880s ditch-and-tunnel system was eventually joined by the federal Dolores Project: the Bureau of Reclamation began building McPhee Dam in 1980, and by 1986 its reservoir was delivering a dependable supply to Cortez, the Ute Tribe, and thousands of valley acres through the project's tunnel and canal system. Today Cortez, the Montezuma County seat and its most populous town, sits around 6,200 feet in high-desert Four Corners country, running on farming, a health system, the Ute Mountain Casino, and a steady stream of travelers. It's the practical basecamp for one of the densest concentrations of archaeology in North America — Mesa Verde, Canyons of the Ancients, and Hovenweep all within reach — a working town wrapped around a thousand years of history.

Cortez today is an unpretentious, sunny high-desert town that doubles as the launchpad for the Four Corners. Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings are a short drive up the road, and from the same base you can reach the tower ruins of Hovenweep, the vast Canyons of the Ancients, and the trails and mesas of the San Juan National Forest. In town, the Cortez Cultural Center and the trading-post shops trade in Ancestral Puebloan and Ute history, and Sleeping Ute Mountain lies on the southwestern skyline like a figure at rest. It's warm, dry, and clear here most of the year, with real seasons but far more sun than the high mountains, and prices and pace that feel a world away from the Front Range. A good day is ruins in the morning, a green-chile lunch, and the light going long and gold over the sage and red rock in the evening.