How Telluride Got Its Name
Near Telluride, Colorado
Ask around town how Telluride got its name and you will hear two very different answers. The official one is chemical. The town is named for tellurium, a rare, brittle element related to gold and silver.
Tellurium forms natural compounds called tellurides, and some of the richest gold ores in the world are gold tellurides. The word itself was coined in seventeen ninety eight by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth, drawn from the Latin word for earth. There is a wrinkle in the story that locals love.
By most accounts, gold telluride minerals were never actually found in significant amounts in these particular mountains. The gold here came bound up in other ores. So the town may be named for a mineral it never really had.
Then there is the tale everyone repeats around the bar. That prospectors heading up the brutal canyon road were told, to hell you ride. Historians consider that a bit of folk etymology, a pun invented after the fact.
But in a town this steep and this remote, you can understand why the joke stuck.
