Grand Junction: Where Two Rivers Meet on the Western Slope

Grand Junction sits at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers, on the Western Slope of the Rockies, in a landscape that looks nothing like what most people picture when they think of Colorado. There are no ski slopes here, no evergreen forests. The terrain is red-rock canyon country: Book Cliffs rising to the north, the Colorado National Monument's sandstone mesas to the west, and irrigated orchards and vineyards tucked into a high desert valley.

The city was founded in eighteen eighty-one, just as the Ute were removed, and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad arrived the following year, cementing Anglo-American settlement of the Western Slope. It was not empty land. The Ute people had lived in this valley for centuries under the unratified agreement that the mountains west of the Continental Divide were their homeland. In eighteen eighty-one, the same year Grand Junction was platted, the United States government forcibly removed the Ute to reservations in Utah and southwestern Colorado. The city's founding and the removal were not coincidental.

Grand Junction grew on agriculture: peaches, pears, and wine grapes thrived in the valley soil with Colorado River irrigation. Mesa County became one of the most productive fruit-growing regions in the Rocky Mountain West.

The twentieth century added another chapter. Uranium ore was discovered in the region's Jurassic sandstone formations, and the Cold War turned Grand Junction into a uranium-milling center. Between nineteen forty-six and nineteen seventy, mills processed millions of tons of ore, leaving behind low-level radioactive tailings that were used as fill material for hundreds of homes and public buildings in the city. A multi-decade federal cleanup, authorized by Congress in nineteen seventy-eight, eventually removed the tailings from more than four thousand sites.

Today the city is the commercial hub of the Western Slope, a pivot point between the ski towns to the east and the canyon country to the west. The orchards are still there. The uranium is largely not.