Parachute: Black Sunday and the Oil Shale Dream

This town has had two names and two lives. J.B. Hurlburt founded it in eighteen eighty-three, naming it after the creek whose forking tributaries resemble parachute cords. By nineteen oh eight, it was incorporated as Grand Valley to piggyback on real estate promotions tied to nearby Grand Junction, train conductors would announce the stop and settlers would disembark thinking they had arrived somewhere bigger than they had.

The Piceance Basin north of here holds the world's largest oil shale reserves, and by the early nineteen eighties Exxon had poured billions into a project to turn that shale into fuel. The town's population quadrupled in three years as workers and their families flooded in.

Then came May second, nineteen eighty-two, Black Sunday. Exxon announced it was canceling the entire five-billion-dollar Colony project, effective immediately. Two thousand workers lost their jobs overnight. The town shrank as fast as it had grown. In nineteen eighty-six the residents voted to take back the original name: Parachute.