Evergreens grow from precarious rootholds on the cliff face of the narrow canyon that encloses Ouray, a town of 1,000 people in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. The canyon runs north-south, with the Uncompahgre River rippling its course along the cliffside.

Steam rises at the north end of town from the city-owned Ouray Hot Springs Pool and Fitness Center. There are actually five pools here, three of which are geothermally heated from a natural hot spring. The air is so still that the susurrous sound of snowflakes hitting the ground is clearly audible. The people relaxing in the pool’s mineral waters feel like they are in their own private snow globe, yet they feel perfectly comfortable – the water in the hottest pool is as high as 106 degrees.

A mile south, at the other end of town, a wall of bluish ice plunges more than 100 feet down the side of Uncompahgre Gorge. This is the Ouray Ice Park, the wintertime mecca for ice climbers around the globe. Using spiky crampons on their boots and handheld ice tools that make them look like praying mantises, the climbers gradually pull themselves up the park’s frozen waterfalls.

Connecting the hot springs pool and the ice park is Main Street, home to nearly all of the businesses in Ouray. It is also just about the only paved road in town – the residential side streets are mostly dirt and gravel.

From the Victorian architecture that dominates Main Street, it is easy to peg Ouray as a former mining boomtown. Before the gold and silver miners arrived in the 1870s, this land was the home of the Uncompahgre band of Utes; the band’s famous Chief Ouray (pronounced “you-RAY”) is the town’s namesake.

The shops and restaurants lining Main Street do a bustling business in the wintertime. That was hardly the case when Bill Whitt moved to town more than 30 years ago.

“Back then, you could lay in the middle of Main Street in January and not get run over,” Whitt said. “There was nobody here.”

Though Ouray has long been a magnet for Jeepers and hikers in the summer months, winters used to be eerily quiet – especially after the local mines closed down in the 1980s. That all started to change after Whitt got the inspiration to create the Ouray Ice Park.

The ice-climbing routes in the ice park aren’t naturally occurring. The first ice wall in Uncompahgre Gorge started thanks to a leaky water pipe connected to the town’s old reservoir. Hoping to expand the climbing, in 1991, Whitt and business partner Gary Wild began to tap the pipe with lengths of hoses connected to showerheads to create manmade waterfalls that would freeze into additional routes up the gorge.

They loved ice climbing, but Whitt and Wild had more than personal recreation in mind. The two had just purchased the Victorian Inn in Ouray. They kept the hotel open through the winter, which was unusual; only one other hotel in Ouray stayed open past the fall. If they rented even one room in January, they considered it a victory – at least it wasn’t a shutout.

Whitt figured that by promoting the sport in Ouray, it might liven up the town in the dead of winter. At first, many people in town were skeptical.

“When we started getting it going, a lot of the locals thought it was the stupidest thing ever,” Whitt said.

It was an admittedly goofy setup. The hoses would always freeze, requiring Whitt to drag the “frozen snakes” back to the Victorian Inn to thaw them out in the hotel’s hot tub.

There were other challenges beyond frozen hoses. Most of the land in the gorge was on the property of the Ouray Hydroelectric Power Plant. The plant’s owner, Eric Jacobson, wasn’t inclined to let people climb on his land for fear he would be held liable if they got hurt.

Fortunately, Wild was a lawyer who knew that Colorado law protects land owners from liability if people get hurt recreating on their property. Wild went over to Jacobson’s office with a six-pack of beer to explain the situation, and by the end of the meeting, they’d struck a deal to allow climbing to continue.

From those beginnings, Ouray Ice Park grew. It had its first official season in 1994, followed by the first Ouray Ice Festival in 1996, founded by the renowned alpinist Jeff Lowe. The park is now an official Ouray city park that is free for anyone to use. Today, Ouray Ice Park has 14 employees, including four full-time “ice farmers” whose job it is to spray water to freeze into the park’s walls of ice.

There isn’t another town on the continent with a public ice park comparable to Ouray’s. It has become the epicenter of ice climbing in North America and a regular training ground for the world’s top climbers – many people who have summited Mount Everest have trained here.

Held each January, the Ouray Ice Festival has become a highlight of the year in town, with thousands of people in attendance. This year, the festival was joined by two other events: the North American ice climbing championship and the All In Ice Fest, which promotes ice climbing among historically marginalized communities.

For the younger generations in Ouray, the ice park has been a constant in their lives. Logan Tyler, a Ouray native and member of the USA Ice Climbing Team, began climbing in the park at age 8. By the time he was in high school, ice climbing was all he could think about.

“I’d show up late to classes because I was in the ice park trying to get pitches in on my lunchbreak,” Tyler said. “My teachers were like, ‘You’re soaking wet! What are you doing?’ ”

When he wasn’t climbing, he was hanging out on Main Street at Ouray Mountain Sports, the climbing and outdoors shop that is the hub for outdoor adventurers in Ouray.

Tyler’s interest in climbing of all kinds led him to a career as an industrial climber ascending cellphone towers. While still in his 20s, he was in charge of two tower crews climbing towers across the Midwest. That career came to an end in 2015, when he was hit by a drunk driver and nearly killed. He had to have his jaw wired shut, and for six months, he couldn’t walk, talk or eat.

It was in the hospital that he decided on a new career path.

“I woke up, and nobody was there – no clients, no boss,” Tyler said. “All the stuff I thought mattered didn’t. In that moment, I knew I was never going to work for somebody else’s dream again.”

Tyler decided to return to Ouray to follow his own dreams. He founded outdoor guiding company Basecamp Ouray and opened an indoor climbing gym in a former theater on Main Street, which is now called the Ouray Adventure Center.

Last year, he launched a new adventure by building his own via ferrata. Italian for “iron way,” a via ferrata is a course that travels along a cliffside on steel rungs driven into the rock. He led a team working 14-hour days for three months to create the Gold Mountain Via Ferrata, which partly travels through the old Memphis Mine.

When he leads clients on tours of the via ferrata, the most mentally challenging part is a 273-foot-long five-cable bridge that traverses hundreds of feet above the ground. To navigate the via ferrata, people must overcome their fears and live completely in the moment, Tyler said.

“We’re taking people out of their comfort zone,” he said. “When you introduce a certain amount of vulnerability, people connect with themselves and others on a deeper level.”

While Ouray is proud of its unofficial status as the outdoor adventure capital of Colorado, it is entirely possible to enjoy the town without adrenaline-pumping outdoor pursuits. Many people spend the day walking up and down Main Street to visit the locally owned shops and restaurants.

It is difficult to tell the historic buildings from the newer construction. The Ouray Brewery, built in 2010, is a popular spot with tourists and locals. The beer is brewed on-site, and the food is served on a rooftop dining area with views of Main Street and the mountains beyond.

Perhaps the jewel of Main Street is the Beaumont Hotel, a grand Victorian edifice that first opened for business in 1887. In its heyday, it hosted visiting celebrities, including presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. But as Ouray’s fortunes declined in the mid-20th century, the hotel fell into hard times and closed in 1967.

The Beaumont remained shuttered for more than 30 years. Before it closed, its then-owner inexplicably painted its beautiful brick exterior pink, leading locals to refer to the vacant building as the “pink elephant.” But with business picking up in Ouray, new owners decided to restore the Beaumont, starting with removing the pink paint. The hotel reopened in 2003, and it is once again an elite destination, hosting such luminaries as Oprah       Winfrey and the singer Jewel.

Restoring Ouray’s historic places has become a theme in town. Catercorner from the Beaumont is the Wright Opera House, which opened a year after the hotel in 1888. Despite its name, no opera has ever been performed at the facility – “opera house” was a sort of code used in the Old West to let people know that that the place showed decent, family-friendly entertainment.

The Wright Opera House fell into disrepair over the years. In 2011, a local nonprofit raised money to purchase the opera house and spent a decade restoring it. The opera house is now a community gathering place for events, plays and movies.

In years past, one of the signature programs at the Wright Opera House was the San Juan Odyssey, a multimedia show with five screens and 15 slide projectors displaying images of the San Juan Mountains that surround Ouray. Orchestrating the show and narrating it was Bill Fries, better known as C.W. McCall, who hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1976 with his novelty country hit “Convoy.”

An Omaha native, Fries’ heart was always in Ouray, and he moved here after he hit it big with “Convoy.” In the 1980s, he even served as the town’s mayor, helping oversee the renovation of its historic town hall. Ouray and environs popped up in Fries’ songs – for instance, “Riverside Slide” is about the snowplow drivers who brave avalanches and hairpin turns on the Million Dollar Highway, which winds along Uncompahgre Gorge south of town.

Fries died at age 93 earlier this year, but anyone who has lived in Ouray for any length of time has a story about him. Over at the Outlaw Restaurant, bartender Colleen Bixler tells stories about serving as city clerk when Fries was mayor; her other stories include the tale of John Wayne’s cowboy hat, which hangs behind the bar – a gift from the actor when he shot True Grit in the area.

Across the street, Fries’ daughter-in-law Sue Fries minds the front of the shop at Ouray Glassworks and Pottery. When customers walk in to browse the shop’s glass vases, drinking glasses and oil decanters, and ceramic salad bowls, Fries informs them that everything is made on-site. She may even invite people out back to see store owner Annie Quathamer blowing glass. She twirls a glowing, molten blob of glass on the end of a long, skinny tube, through which she then blows to shape the blob into its final form.

Though Quathamer has lived in Ouray for more than 20 years, the town’s beauty still hasn’t gotten old. “I’ll be walking down the street and go, ‘Oh, it’s so pretty,’ and I’ll start taking pictures, just like the tourists,” she said. “I just feel so grateful to call this home.”

Citizens of Ouray are grateful to be able to live here. After all, finding a house to buy or rent is quite difficult. The town is confined to a canyon with little room to expand, and what few homes there are have skyrocketed in price in just the past few years. About half the houses are second homes whose owners generally only live there in summer. This forces many people who work in town to commute from Ridgway or Montrose.

A bumper sticker that speaks to the full-time populace’s sometimes tense relationship with second-home owners has started appearing around town. It reads: “What do you mean there’s an employee housing problem? I own several vacant homes in Ouray.”

Local business owners have taken some creative measures to solve the housing problem. Last year, when the Ouray Chalet Inn – across Main Street from the Beaumont – came up for sale, the owners of San Juan Mountain Guides, Ouray Grocery, Ridgway Mountain Market and Twin Peaks Lodge joined together to purchase the motel to use as affordable housing for their workers.

Selling the Ouray Chalet Inn was emotionally difficult for Lora Slawitschka – her family had owned the motel for 50 years, and it had been her childhood home.  “But to know that it is being used in a way that’s so beneficial to the community made the transition easier,” she said.

Main Street has its share of celebrity sightings. Sometimes the famous folks are visiting; sometimes they’re local, such as fashion designer Ralph Lauren, who has a ranch nearby. But of all the celebrities in Ouray, no one generates more excitement from passersby than the world-famous Dexter Dog.

When owner Kentee Pasek first brought Dexter home as a puppy, he was a normal Brittany spaniel, albeit one whose outgoing and affectionate demeanor made him beloved by students across the street at the K-12 Ouray School. But then, in 2016, young Dexter escaped from his yard, ran into the street was run over by a truck. One of his front legs had to be amputated. Pasek hoped he could use his remaining front leg to walk around tripod-style, but the elbow was too damaged to support his weight.

For two months, Dexter struggled to move, having to be carried outside to go to the bathroom. But one day, Pasek carried Dexter outside, down the porch stairs and to the lawn, then went back inside to get a cup of coffee – and when she returned, Dexter was somehow on the porch. She carried him back down, then watched in amazement as he hopped onto his hind legs and walked up the stairs like a human being.

From that moment on, Dexter has been bipedal. People in town became accustomed to the sight of Pasek or a family member taking Dexter for a walk, the dog walking upright, standing an impressive 4-foot-2. Many in Ouray started following Dexter on Instagram.

In June 2020, a tourist from Arizona saw Pasek’s mother walking Dexter down Main Street and quickly took a cellphone video, then posted it on TikTok. The video went viral and soon was shown on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Media from across the nation and beyond started clamoring to meet Dexter, who has now been featured on CBS Evening News, the BBC and much more.

Dexter hasn’t forgotten where he came from – he still walks proudly in Ouray’s Fourth of July and Yule Night parades.

For the more than million people who follow Dexter on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, he has become a symbol of overcoming adversity. But there’s something distinctly Ouray about him that people in his hometown recognize.

“There’s a tenacity about Ouray, a strength about Ouray,” Pasek said. “The faint of heart don’t live here. A lot of people love it for a moment, but we still have dirt streets and all kinds of weather. Many of us have chosen to quit huge corporate jobs and taken pay cuts to live here and make it work.”

Tenacious and strong, the people – and dogs – of Ouray keep walking tall.