Telluride, Colorado

Everything Telluride is known for

18 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Telluride

Songs About Telluride

Telluride
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
83%
"Now the girls in Telluride do it like this"
telluride song
feeding leroy
82%
Telluride
Tim McGraw
79%
"Telluride, the snow falling down"
Telluride
Kate Wolf
79%
"Telluride"
Telluride
The Lone Bellow
78%
"Hickory to Telluride"
Telluride
Leif Vollebekk
77%
"Telluride, Telluride, Telluride"
Happy Anywhere (feat. Gwen Stefani)
Blake Shelton
70%
"The blue sky over Telluride"
Colorado Christmas
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
55%
"From Telluride to Boulder down below"
Rain in Durango
Guy Clark
54%
"And she came down from Telluride"
Sun Sets in Colorado
Dierks Bentley
54%
"Telluride along with me"
Circles Around Me
Sam Bush
52%
"High in Telluride, up on Bridal Veil"
Black Bear Road
C.W. McCall
52%
"supposed to get to Telluride"
Hill I’ll Die On
Hudson Westbrook
51%
"Whether it's Texas or Telluride, I"
Bar In Baton Rogue
Lainey Wilson
50%
"My head is north of Telluride"
Happy Anywhere
Blake Shelton
10%
"The blue sky over Telluride"
Altitude Adjustment
Midland
5%
"Go hitch a ride to Telluride where I know the lingo"
Bitch Please
Snoop Dogg
3%
"Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy"
Howdy Bish
Ryan Charles
3%
"I’m like Butch Cassidy and that Sundance Kid"

Artists From Telluride

S
String Cheese Incident
americana Pop: 60

Rivers & Roads in Song near Telluride

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

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

History of Telluride

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.

A Speck Gives You Garlic Breath for Weeks RoadyGoat

Tellurium has one of the strangest party tricks in all of chemistry. Get even a microscopic trace into your body and you will reek of garlic, powerfully, for days or even weeks. Your body treats tellurium much like sulfur and tags it onto a small molecule called dimethyl telluride, which you then breathe out and sweat through your pores. Half a millionth of a gram is enough to produce fierce garlic breath for around thirty hours. One documented case, after a larger dose, had the person smelling of garlic for two hundred and thirty-seven days. The effect is wildly out of proportion to the amount involved, and at trace levels it is essentially harmless, just socially devastating. Chemists who work with tellurium learn to keep their distance from friends and family, because no amount of brushing or mouthwash will scrub that garlic cloud away.

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.

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.

Everything Near Telluride

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

Explore Telluride on the Map
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