Telluride United States

Legendary

Photo by Brendan Gray

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On June 24, 1889, a young man named Robert LeRoy Parker walked into the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride and walked out with more than $20,000. Nobody ever recovered it.

He later changed his name to Butch Cassidy. It was the first bank robbery of his career, and it happened here.

Telluride sits at the end of a box canyon in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. The only way in is the way you came, which is part of how it got its reputation.

Gold was found in the valley in the 1850s, and the town was founded around 1878 under the name Columbia. Another Columbia in California kept confusing the postal service, so the name was changed to Telluride.

Most people say the name comes from tellurium, an element often found alongside gold and silver. Others insist it comes from what people shouted at anyone heading up the canyon: "to hell you ride."

The mining was spectacularly good. The Tomboy Mine alone was one of the greatest gold producers in the world, and around $360 million in gold came out of the area.

At the peak, about 5,000 people lived here, and for a while the town reportedly had more millionaires per person than New York City. It also had saloons, gambling halls, and a red-light district on Pacific Avenue.

Telluride was an early adopter of something surprising. In the 1890s it became home to the world's first power plant that could send alternating current electricity a long distance, so this remote mining camp had street lights before many big cities did.

The silver crash of 1893 started the decline. By the Great Depression the population was down to 505, and the last mine closed in 1978.

A businessman from Beverly Hills named Joe Zoline looked at all that snow and saw ski runs. Telluride Ski Resort opened on December 22, 1972, with five lifts and a day lodge.

The town protected its old buildings fiercely. The entire downtown is a National Historic Landmark District, and the bank Cassidy robbed is still standing.

Ride the free gondola between town and Mountain Village, the only free public gondola in the United States, and look down on the canyon on the way. Walk Colorado Avenue past the 1895 New Sheridan Hotel and the 1913 Opera House. Hike or drive to Bridal Veil Falls, the tallest free-falling waterfall in Colorado, at the end of the canyon.