Ouray, Colorado

Everything Ouray is known for

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Music in Ouray

Songs About Ouray

No songs reference Ouray yet.

Artists From Ouray

C
C.W. McCall
country Pop: 49

Rivers & Roads in Song near Ouray

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Ouray.

Cimarron River 5 songs Rio Grande / Río Bravo 83 songs Rio Grande / Río Bravo 144 songs

History of Ouray

Rarer Than the Gold They Dug For RoadyGoat

Tellurium, the element this town is named for, is staggeringly rare. In Earth's crust it sits at roughly three parts per billion, making it about eight times scarcer than gold and on par with platinum. That puts it among the rarest stable solid elements on the planet, scarcer even than the so-called rare earth metals. The reason is cosmic timing. When the young Earth was still a ball of fire, tellurium readily formed a lightweight gaseous compound that simply boiled off into space before the planet cooled and locked the rest of its ingredients in. Out in the wider universe tellurium isn't unusual at all, but here on Earth most of it escaped. So a town of gold miners ended up named for an element rarer than the very gold they spent their lives chasing through these mountains.

14.8 mi away

The Rare Metal Powering Solar Farms RoadyGoat

That obscure element behind the town's name has quietly become a clean-energy workhorse. Paired with cadmium to make a compound called cadmium telluride, tellurium forms the heart of a leading kind of thin-film solar panel. These cells use a layer thousands of times thinner than a human hair, and they are the one thin-film technology that can undercut traditional silicon panels on cost. More than thirty gigawatts of cadmium telluride panels are already installed worldwide, and the technology holds a large share of America's big utility-scale solar market. Tellurium also shows up, as a cousin called bismuth telluride, inside the small solid-state coolers that chill everything from camping fridges to computer chips. Not bad for a metal so rare it nearly escaped into space, named after a town that never actually had any in its rocks.

14.8 mi away

Named for an Ore That Was Never Here RoadyGoat

1880

Telluride took its name around 1880 from tellurium, the element behind gold-telluride ores prized in other mining districts. There's just one twist: those telluride minerals were never actually found in the ground here. The local gold turned up in other forms entirely, so the town carries the name of an ore that wasn't beneath it. The boosters and assayers who christened the camp were betting on the kind of rich tellurium-bearing veins that had made other Colorado strikes famous, and the name stuck even as the geology refused to cooperate. You may also have heard the colorful folk tale that the name is a warning, 'to hell you ride.' That's a charming later invention. The real story is quieter and stranger: a mining town named for a chemical element that never showed up to the party.

14.9 mi away

Telluride - Butch Cassidy's First Bank Job

1889

On June 24, 1889, a young Robert LeRoy Parker walked into the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride and committed his first bank robbery, stealing $21,000 and launching the career of Butch Cassidy.

14.9 mi away

Everything Near Ouray

13 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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