The Ouray Ice Park officially closes on the 22nd of March, and within forty-eight hours the town's seasonal population drops by perhaps two-thirds.
Ouray, Colorado, sits at the head of a box canyon at 7,792 ft, walled on three sides by the San Juan Mountains. Its year-round population is 980. In January and February that number more than doubles with climbers; in July and August it triples with road-trippers on the Million Dollar Highway.
Between those seasons there is a six-week window, roughly from late March to mid-May, when the town is functionally itself.
Andrea Petrocelli has owned the Ouray Brewery on Main Street since 2012. She closes for three weeks in early April every year, takes her staff to the coast, and reopens on the 28th to a clientele that is, she says, almost entirely local. April is the only month I know everyone's name in my own bar, she said.
The Box Cañon Falls park closes its lower trail in early April for annual maintenance. The upper viewing platform stays open. On the 4th of April there was still ice along the north wall of the gorge, twenty feet deep where the spray had built up over the winter.
The ice park itself, a 2-km stretch of vertical canyon along the Uncompahgre River where farmers and climbers have been intentionally growing ice walls since 1995, looks strange in shoulder season. The pipes that feed water down the canyon walls are visible. The catwalks are empty.
Bjorn Eklund, who has worked as an ice-farmer at the park for nine seasons, was on site on the 7th of April winterising equipment. He said the late-season melt was running about a week ahead of historical averages. The park's mean closing date over the last twenty years is the 21st of March, but he expected to be done with shutdown by the 12th this year.
Most of the climbing-specific lodging in town goes dark in April. The Ouray Victorian Inn closes its annex from the 1st to the 22nd. The Beaumont Hotel, restored from a 1886 mining-era building, keeps its bar open but rents only six of its twelve rooms.
What stays open is the working town. The post office. The grocery store, called Duckett's, which has been on the corner of 7th and Main since 1947. The hardware store. The two restaurants that the locals actually use, which are not the ones the climbers know.
The hot springs pool, fed by the same geothermal vent that has made Ouray a destination since the 1880s, runs all year. In April it has perhaps thirty visitors on a weekday afternoon, against three hundred in July.
The road over Red Mountain Pass to Silverton, US 550, is technically open year-round but is regularly closed for avalanche control in spring. On the 8th of April the pass was closed from 4 a.m. until 11 a.m. while CDOT crews worked the upper switchbacks above the Riverside Slide.
The Million Dollar Highway, which is the local name for this stretch of US 550, has no guardrails for most of its length above 10,000 ft. In good weather it is a magnificent drive. In April it is sometimes simply a closed road.
Rock climbing in the area resumes slowly. The crags at Pool Wall, on the north side of the canyon, can come into condition by late April in a warm year, but the Ophir Wall and the alpine routes on Mount Sneffels remain out of season until June.
There are perhaps six or seven climbers in town on a typical April weekday. Most are local guides catching up on paperwork, or transient climbers waiting out a storm before driving to Indian Creek in Utah.
Ouray Mountain Rescue, an all-volunteer team founded in 1979, runs its annual recertification weekend in mid-April. On the 11th and 12th, twenty-three members spent two days running litter-evacuation drills on the lower slopes of the Amphitheater, the cirque above town.
Team captain Margery Wiltshire, a registered nurse at the Mountain Medical Center who has been on the team for fourteen years, said the April weekend is the most important training event of their year. Summer is when people get hurt, she said. April is when we make sure we are ready.
The aspens above town do not leaf out until late May at this elevation. In April the hillsides are still grey-brown. The first wildflowers — pasque flowers, glacier lilies — appear on south-facing slopes around the 25th of the month in a normal year.
On the 12th of April a thin snow fell overnight, perhaps an inch, and was gone by ten in the morning. Mud Street, which is what the locals call the unpaved alley behind Main, lived up to its name for two days.
Anders Hoffmann, who has visited Ouray three times in the last decade, called it one of the few American mountain towns that still has a real shoulder season. Most resort towns are now busy year-round, he said. Ouray still gets to rest.
By the third week of May the rock climbers return, and the town shifts again. The brewery reopens its patio. The Beaumont fills its rooms. The pass holds clear.
April in Ouray is not a tourist month, and the town is not interested in changing that. It is, for six weeks, simply itself.
