The Box Canyon
Near Telluride, Colorado
Notice how the mountains close in around you. Telluride sits at roughly eight thousand seven hundred fifty feet above sea level, cradled at the dead end of what geographers call a box canyon. A valley with walls on three sides and only one way in.
The San Miguel River carved this notch, but the real sculptor was ice. During the last great ice age, glaciers ground down through here, gouging out a wide, flat bottomed valley and steepening the walls into cliffs that rise steeply for thousands of feet. At the head of the canyon, that ice left a natural amphitheater of rock, and over its rim spills Bridal Veil Falls.
This geography shaped everything about the town. Telluride is a compact grid of only a few blocks, hemmed in by cliffs to the north and the river to the south, with almost nowhere to grow. What was a limitation for the miners has become a gift for the town, because those same walls that trapped it have kept it small, compact, and ringed by peaks that climb past thirteen and fourteen thousand feet.
