Montrose, Colorado

Montrose began as a supply town at a moment of hard change in the Uncompahgre Valley. Settlers had eyed the valley in the 1870s but could not legally buy land until after September 1881, when the federal government removed the Ute people from western Colorado to a reservation in Utah. The first stake went in that December, and in 1882 the town took shape. A former Gunnison merchant named Joseph Selig laid it out and named it Montrose after a character in Sir Walter Scott's novel 'A Legend of Montrose.' That same year the Denver and Rio Grande pushed its narrow-gauge line through on its way west, and Montrose became the place where miners in the surrounding camps got outfitted and where ore and goods changed hands. It was a railroad supply town first, sitting at about 5,800 feet where the plains-like valley floor meets the mesas and mountains of the Western Slope.

When the mines faded, the valley's future turned on water. The land was fertile but dry, and the Gunnison River ran right past it — trapped at the bottom of the sheer Black Canyon, out of reach. So the new U.S. Bureau of Reclamation took it on as one of its very first projects. Between 1905 and 1909, crews bored the Gunnison Tunnel, roughly 5.8 miles through Vernal Mesa, to carry Gunnison River water into the Uncompahgre Valley. On July 6, 1909, diggers working from both portals met in the middle, and it opened as the longest irrigation tunnel in the world. That September, President William Howard Taft came to Montrose to dedicate it. The tunnel turned dry ground into farmland, and it still irrigates tens of thousands of valley acres today.

Modern Montrose wears both of those histories. It is the county seat and the trade center for a wide stretch of the Western Slope, with a working farm valley of alfalfa, corn, and orchards around it that exists because of that century-old tunnel. It has grown into a manufacturing and outdoor-recreation hub — fly-fishing gear makers among the companies based here — and it is a main gateway to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, whose south rim is only about 15 miles east. The valley's first people are honored, too: just south of town, the Ute Indian Museum sits on land that was the homestead of the Tabeguache Ute leader Ouray and his wife Chipeta, and today it is run by History Colorado as a rare museum in the state dedicated to a single tribe.

Montrose today feels like a real working Western Slope town rather than a resort — walkable and unpretentious, with a downtown of brick storefronts, local coffee and breweries, and a farmers-market-and-riverside-park kind of rhythm. The Uncompahgre River runs right through it, with a whitewater sports park and miles of connected trail, and the recreation center, dozens of parks, and big open skies make it an easy place to be outside. What sets Montrose apart is what's within an easy drive: the jaw-dropping cliffs of Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park about fifteen miles east, the San Juan Mountains and Ouray's alpine hot springs to the south, Grand Mesa to the north, and world-class fishing on the Gunnison. It's a base town — sunny, affordable by Colorado standards, and close to a remarkable amount of country — where a weekend can mean a canyon rim, a trout stream, and a patio in the same day.