Ouray and the lay of the land

It is Sunday morning and you are up checking your e-mail and Facebook stuff. There is another release from that Williams guy who is in that place, somewhere in Colorado. You roll your eyes and mumble under your breath about someone getting a life and not filling up your time with such dribble. So I have an idea for those people-go start a nice hot bath, your joints ache anyways and you can justify it, throw in some bath salts, they will help. Take your clock radio in with you and listen to NPR, catch up on the news while you relax, then, just for the heck of it, PULL THE RADIO IN THE BATH WITH YOU.

For the rest, let me give you a quick lay of the land-

Ouray is ten official blocks long and six blocks wide if you don't count Oak Street on the other side of the river that flows down the west side of town. To the north, beyond 10th Avenue, is the park, the hot springs, and several RV parks and support facilities like a gas station. To the south, through some of the prettiest and dangerous mountain passes in the U.S. is Silverton. The town is in a grid with streets running north and south and avenues running east and west. Main Street is really state highway 550, connecting Durango on the south to Montrose on the north. It goes beyond those towns but that's all I care about.

I try to head out every morning before the sun is up, trying to see what's what, who is who and will report on those findings. As you can see from the photo above, state route 550 is not too busy. There were eight cars parked on the street from about 3rd Avenue on the south to 10th Avenue on the north. The mountains around the town are so high, the sun doesn't hit the valley floor until well, now, about 8:30.

This morning was just a quick scouting mission. After making my first cup of coffee, I headed east up to 6th Street on the far east side, my favorite street because it backs up to the forest. You think of places in your mind and you quietly tell yourself, "If I just had this, my life would be complete." That is 6th Street to me. Peace sits on a front porch rocker here.

Except for Tommy Hoggins. He lives on 4th Avenu,e that intersects 6th. He could be heard calling his mother with that nasally voice of his. "Mom?" Mom!" You know the one, the frequency of someone's finger nails on a chalk board, which is okay if it hadn't been for Tommy Hoggins being forty-seven years old and still living at home.   

As 6th Street turns back west and down into the heart of the town, I walked past the toboggan hill, looking for the Bad Boys of Ouray. They are three not so young deer that hang out together and their whole mission in life is to find rose bushes, cherry trees, any flowering plant at all, and consume it. If they were your kids, you would be getting phone calls from people telling you your teenage boys were going through the alleys looking into peoples' trash cans for cool stuff. Mischief makers they are, with a 'tood. I wasn't expecting to see them, still disappointed from last year when they didn't show at all, but as I came out of the Artisan Bakery with my first cup of refreshed coffee, there they were, working their way from the west side of Main to the east on 4th Avenue, stopping traffic (okay, just one truck) while they moseyed across the highway. There were only two of them and sure, they might not be the same three deer, so? My feeling is the third one was either up early and already got the goods its brothers didn't, or was still incarcerated in the prison in Uruguay for the bar fight it started.   

So far, so good. I will give you reports on the businesses and who is still here. You need clarity on things like this. You need to know, for example, the difference between Ouray Brewery and Ouray House Brewery. Not that it really makes any difference to any of us, a cold beer is a cold beer.  One place might be a well run, clean establishment with a waitress that wipes down your table and greets you with a smile. The other might be where your high school teacher fled to after the warrants for his arrest came out regarding that little misunderstanding with the school credit card. Again, if the beer is cold....