Road trip: Being a tourist in Grand Junction

Over the Presidents' Day weekend I had the opportunity to take a road trip to visit friends in Grand Junction. I met some of the great librarians from the Mesa County Central Library, drove up to Colorado National Monument, and learned about some local Grand Junction folklore.

The Western History / Genealogy department has a collection of brochures from the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce promoting all of the things for tourists to do while visiting the Western Slope.

The town of Grand Junction has changed over the years from being home to the Ute tribe, to being an ideal location for harvesting fruit, to being a boom-town with uranium mining. The one thing that hasn't changed is the amazing outdoor attractions.  Colorado National Monument is just as amazing as the pictures in these old tourist guides suggest.  Mountain biking remains one of the main attractions of the western slope of Colorado.

The peaches still bring tourists to the western slope, but at one time the landscape was full of orchards and farms. Beet farming was a major industry in the area. In 1899 The Colorado Sugar Manufacturing Company was built near the Grand River and later was sold to Western Sugar and Land Company which was one of the largest employers in Grand Junction at the time.

I'll end this blog post with folklore some locals shared with me. Allegedly if you are in Grand Junction for more than 30 days you must take dirt from all three of the mesas before you leave or you will be pulled back to Grand Junction. The only reference I could find to this story, other than word-of-mouth, was in the Grand Valley Wikipedia page.