10 Sep: After our Coloradan family and friends headed back to their homes, we started heading toward states we hadn’t traveled in before. On the way south from Black Canyon, we drove past Telluride in the scenic San Juan Mountains. In its early days, Telluride was a mining town, not the glamorous ski destination it is today. Roadside plaques told us of events like when Butch Cassidy began his notorious outlaw career by robbing a bank in Telluride and when AC electricity (promoted by George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla) was chosen instead of DC (promoted by Thomas Edison) for the first commercial generating plant in the U.S. (Ames Power Plant) to provide power to operate the Gold King Mill.
The Canyons of the Ancients National Monument visitor center and museum near Dolores, Colo., was built as a repository for the large number of artifacts found during 1978-1983 by archaeologists in the area to be flooded by a dam on the Dolores River. The visitor center exhibits give an excellent overview of ancient cultures of Ancestral Pueblo people in the four corners area. A short self-guided nature trail leads from the visitor center to an ancient ruin atop a hill overlooking the reservoir.
Also in the town of Dolores we went to the small free railroad museum dedicated to the Galloping Goose. This was a series of small rail cars, powered by automobile or truck engines rather than by the earlier steam locomotives, that provided mail service on the narrow gauge railway from Durango to Ridgway in the 1930s to the early 1950s.
