Montrose: Gateway to the Black Canyon

Montrose sits at the northern end of the Uncompahgre Valley at an elevation of five thousand eight hundred feet, which is low by Colorado standards and exactly why it became the agricultural and commercial hub for the surrounding region. The valley floor is wide and the growing season is long enough for fruit orchards, and when the Denver and Rio Grande Railway arrived in eighteen eighty-two, the town was positioned to move whatever the valley produced.

The Uncompahgre Ute had used the valley for centuries before any of this. The Gunnison Tunnel, completed in nineteen oh nine, diverted water from the Gunnison River through six miles of bored rock into the Uncompahgre Valley. It was one of the largest irrigation projects undertaken in the early twentieth century American West, and it transformed the valley's agricultural capacity overnight. Orchards that had depended on limited irrigation expanded. New farms took hold on ground that had previously been too dry.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison sits twelve miles east of Montrose, and for most of the town's early history it was regarded primarily as an obstacle. The canyon's walls drop two thousand two hundred fifty feet through Precambrian rock that is older than most of the solar system's planets, and the river at the bottom runs through sections so narrow that they receive as little as thirty minutes of direct sunlight each day. The first documented descent of the inner gorge was in nineteen oh one, by a survey party looking for an irrigation tunnel route. They concluded the canyon was impassable and reported it with the careful exhaustion of people who had spent two weeks trying.

Congress designated Black Canyon a national monument in nineteen thirty-three, and redesignated it a national park in nineteen ninety-nine. Montrose became the access point by geography. It is the place where travelers stock up before driving east into terrain that gets progressively more vertical.

The Elks Lodge on South First Street, built in nineteen twenty-seven by the local Elks chapter that had organized in nineteen oh six, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its eclectic mix of Mission Revival, Pueblo Deco, and Gothic Revival ornament makes it one of the more architecturally layered buildings in a town not generally known for architectural complexity. It hosted graduation ceremonies and community dinners for over forty years before the Elks moved to a new building in nineteen sixty-nine.