Ridgway State Park

On this years Colorado Road Trip, we’re spending a fair amount of time in the south western part of the state. The area on the western side of the Continental Divide is called the Western Slope.  All the big cities, like Fort Collins, Denver, and Colorado Springs are on the eastern side of the Rockies in what is referred to as the Front Range Urban Corridor. Over 65% of Colorado’s population lives in this area.

I find the mountain areas and the Western Slope to be more bucolic and very appealing. These areas don’t have all the development, traffic, and all the people that are found in the Urban Corridor. Instead, it’s a varied landscape of white capped mountains, green valleys, desert like plains, mesa’s, canyons, and rushing rivers. It also has a great collection of small mountain towns that we’ve been visiting.

Cimarrons from Ridgway

After leaving Gunnison, we traveled west on Route 50 over to Montrose and then down Route 550 to Ridgway to begin exploring the San Juan Mountain area. Ridgway is a small place (population 900) that was started as a railroad junction for the mining towns of Telluride and Ouray. The Rio Grande Southern Railroad hauled mining ore out of these towns to Ridgway and then down to Durango.  It’s referred to as the gateway to the San Juan Mountains. We used Ridgway as a base to explore the surrounding areas and towns of Telluride (33 miles away) and Ouray (10 miles away).

We spent four nights at Ridgway State Park. This is a large state park that sits of the shores of the Ridgway Reservoir, a huge man-made lake held back by the Ridgway Dam. The state park has three camping areas with a total of 258 campsites. We stayed in the Dakota Terraces section. This section sits above the shore of the reservoir on the shoulder of a southern facing hill. It’s a open area with nice views of the hills to the south and mountains to the west. All the sites in this section have electricity and there are shared water spigots between sites. There’s a dump station at the entrance to the camping area. Each section has a camper services building with restrooms, showers, and laundry.

It’s a beautiful state park that provides boating, fishing, swimming, and camping. All the campsites are paved and well spaced. It’s also one of Colorado’s more popular state parks. The camp host told me that beginning in mid June, the campgrounds are booked solid on each weekend throughout the summer. The daily camping fee is $22 plus a $7 per day vehicle pass fee. Here’s a short video I made to show what it is like.

The town of Ridgway and the surrounding area is notable for being the place where much of the John Wayne movie True Grit was filmed. Parts of the film where shot in town, where it was made to look like Fort Smith, Arkansas. The scenes from Mattie Ross’s farm, where Rooster jumped his horse over the fence, were shot near the Dallas Divide off Last Dollar Road. The famous shoot out scene in the meadow where Rooster Cogburn puts the reins in his mouth and takes on Ned Pepper and three outlaws (“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!”) was shot in Deb’s Meadow near Owl Creek Pass. All of these places can be reached by car (not so much with a 26 ft RV).  The True Grit Cafe in Ridgway has quite a bit of memorabilia on the movie.  Here’s a gallery of pictures from Ridgway that show places and things from the movie.

Other notable attractions in Ridgway include the Orvis Hot Springs. Originally used by the Ute people, it’s now a small resort where you can pay to use the hot springs. The resort has four outside pools that are naturally fed with warm lithium water. Each pool has a different temperature. It’s a very nicely landscaped and peaceful area. The pools are swimsuit optional (think skinny dipping) and wearing a swimsuit in the pools is just fine, which is what my son and I did as well as about half the people we saw. There were only about 20 people there on the afternoon we visited and most were either submerged up to their necks in the water on sitting in chairs or benches wrapped in towels. It was a very comfortable setting.  My son has bad back so sitting in the pools was helped to him. I’m not much of a soaker or hot tub type of person, but I found myself very relaxed after soaking in the water for about 90 minutes.

Some other notable things about Ridgway are that the Gammy Award trophys are manufactured by Billings Artworks in Ridgway.  Also, actor Dennis Weaver, of the TV shows Gunsmoke and McCloud, made his home in Ridway.

With all the travel we did to get here, It was good to stay put for a few days.  We spent four days at Ridgway State Park exploring the area.  There are a few commercial campgrounds up in Ouray and some Forest Service places to camp south of Telluride.  For us Ridgway, was a great spot to explore the area.