Grand County and the Fraser River
Near Winter Park, Colorado
The Fraser River that flows through this valley is not the famous Fraser of British Columbia but a Colorado stream with its own quiet significance. It rises at the Continental Divide near Berthoud Pass. Farther north, the Never Summer Mountains take their name from an Arapaho phrase that early Euro-American settlers heard and rendered into English.
The Never Summer Mountains are not a figure of speech but a description: snow lingers on their upper slopes long into summer. The Fraser River drains much of Grand County before joining the Colorado River near the town of Granby. Grand County itself is one of Colorado's larger and emptier counties, stretching from the ski towns of the Fraser Valley across ranch land and national forest to the headwaters of the Colorado River.
The county was organized in eighteen seventy-four, the same year William Cozens put down his first homestead in the valley. For most of its history, Grand County meant cattle ranching, timber, and a hard-scratched rural life at high altitude, far from the population centers of the Front Range. The railroad opened the valley to outside visitors in the nineteen twenties and thirties.
The ski resort after nineteen forty drew a different class of guest entirely. Today the valley tries to balance the competing pressures of resort development, second-home construction, and the ranching legacy that shaped it first, a tension familiar to mountain communities across the West but nowhere more visible than in a valley that went from a sheriff's homestead to a ski resort in less than a single human lifetime.
