Ridgway: Gateway to the San Juans
Near Ridgway, Colorado
Ridgway was born in eighteen ninety when the Rio Grande Southern narrow-gauge railroad chose this valley as its headquarters. The railroad fanned out from here toward Telluride to the east and Durango to the south, serving the mines and ranches scattered across the San Juans. A roundhouse and depot anchored the town and articles of incorporation were filed in May of eighteen ninety.
Because it sat at the junction of routes leading into the mountains on three sides, Ridgway earned the nickname Gateway to the San Juans. After the mining era ended and the Rio Grande Southern shut down in the nineteen fifties, the town settled into a quieter agricultural life along the Uncompahgre River. A broader audience found it when parts of True Grit were filmed here in nineteen sixty-eight. Today Ridgway is a small town of roughly twelve hundred residents, surrounded by the same peaks that drew the railroad engineers here in the first place.
