Ridgway: Otto Mears and the Town That Held the San Juans Together
Near Ridgway, Colorado
The man most responsible for making the San Juan Mountains economically viable was a Russian orphan who came to the United States at age eleven and taught himself to build roads through terrain that other engineers pronounced impossible.
Otto Mears arrived in Colorado in the eighteen sixties and began building toll roads through mountain passes not because he was a visionary but because the existing trails were unusable and someone willing to do the work stood to make money. He built his first road in eighteen seventy over Poncha Pass, charged a fee to use it, and reinvested the earnings into the next road. Over the following two decades he built more than four hundred fifty miles of roads through the San Juan Mountains, connecting mining camps, supply towns, and smelters in a network that transformed isolated mineral deposits into a functioning economy.
The road between Ouray and Silverton, which became the Million Dollar Highway, was his. So was the Rio Grande Southern Railroad, incorporated in eighteen eighty-nine, which he built through some of the most technically demanding terrain on the continent. The southern terminus of the Rio Grande Southern was Durango. The northern terminus was a junction he created at the edge of the Uncompahgre Valley and named for Robert M. Ridgway, a Denver and Rio Grande railroad superintendent.
The town of Ridgway was platted in eighteen ninety as a railroad junction. It served as the switching point between Mears' Rio Grande Southern, running south through Telluride and Durango, and the Denver and Rio Grande main line running north toward Montrose and the rest of Colorado. Without the junction, the mining camps of the southern San Juans had no direct rail connection to the national network.
The Rio Grande Southern ran until nineteen fifty-one, its final years sustained partly by the famous Galloping Geese, improvised railcars built from automobile bodies mounted on flanged wheels because steam trains had become too expensive to justify for the dwindling freight traffic. When the railroad ended, the economic rationale for Ridgway as a junction dissolved with it.
The town Mears built is quieter now, a gateway community in a landscape that draws visitors for what the mining economy once obscured: the mountains themselves.
