Butch

We set off to the south early today, at first towards Ouray, following the Gunnison River. Off to our left were the mesas – table top mountains – but these soon gave way to more traditional (or familiar) alpine-type areas. This area is known as ‘the  Switzerland of America’, because it sports a number of ski resorts, including the best known, Telluride (which also has a jazz festival). We are in the Wild West now. Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank here (the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride)  and Ouray, our first port of call, still has some of the architecture (above all, the 1876 Beaumont Hotel) dating from its time as a town full of prospectors, spending their gold money on women and whiskey. (Women, though, soon started to clean the place up.) It’s a pretty place but, looking at its main street with the boutiques for stop-off coach parties, I wondered what it must be like when the tourists are not around. I have made a point during this trip of buying at least one local newspaper every day and so today I got the Ouray County Plaindealer (a weekly). The paper publishes the Marshal’s and the Sheriff’s logs and they give an idea: a ‘two-vehicle accident on private property; moderate damage, no injuries’; ‘officer stopped motorist and notified him he had a flat tire’; a ‘female with shortness of breath transported to hospital’; an ‘intoxicated individual’; a report of cows on the highway; a ‘car deer accident minor damage’; a male contacted for ‘urinating in Hartwell Park’… Andy Warhol’s observation about small towns came back to me. Clearly, Ouray’s wild past is well and truly behind it.