DIA to Grand Junction.
I-70, end to end.

The Destination, By The People Who Drive It

A town founded at a river junction three weeks after the Utes were forced out

Grand Junction was laid out on September 26, 1881 by George Crawford and a small group of investors, less than a month after the Ute people were removed from the Western Slope. The name is literal: this is where the Gunnison joins the river then called the Grand, now the Colorado. Irrigation turned a desert valley into orchards, and the valley has been trading on fruit, minerals and, lately, wine and mountain bikes ever since.

We also run Montrose, Delta and the Aspen road over McClure Pass or up Highway 82, which is a different trip in winter than the map suggests.

If we got one morning, it would be Rim Rock Drive

John Otto arrived in these canyons in 1906, decided they were the heart of the world, and spent years building trails by hand and campaigning to have them protected. The monument was established in 1911 and Otto became its first custodian at a dollar a month. The road along the rim was cut by Civilian Conservation Corps crews starting in 1933.

Twenty-three miles of it hang on the canyon edge with tunnels blasted through the sandstone. It takes an hour to drive slowly, the overlooks are five steps from the car, and at sunrise the whole valley below is in shadow while the rock is on fire. There is no better first hour in western Colorado.

The weather, told straight

The Grand Valley sits at about 4,600 feet in a rain shadow, which makes it the warmest and driest corner of Colorado. Summer runs genuinely hot, over a hundred degrees in July, and winter is mild by state standards with occasional inversions that trap cold fog in the valley for days.

The relevant weather for a traveller is not here, it is behind you on I-70. This town can be sunny and sixty while the corridor you need to leave on is closed at Vail. That gap is the single most common reason a Grand Junction trip goes sideways, and it is the thing we watch.

Peaches, then oil, then wine

Irrigation from the Colorado made the valley an orchard district by the 1890s, and Palisade peaches are still the state's most protected agricultural brand. The uranium and oil shale booms came and went in the twentieth century, taking the town's fortunes with them each time.

What stuck is a working city of about sixty-five thousand with a university, a regional hospital system and a wine industry: more than two dozen wineries within twenty minutes of downtown. Most of our leisure work here is a full-day wine tour, quoted hourly with a pickup at your hotel and no one driving home from a tasting room.