L'or des fous

Telluride, Colorado, was once a place where a man could earn a beating for wearing his hair long, a woman an unsavory reputation for living alone. No more, writes Rob Schultheis in this lively portrait of the old mining town.

Set in the San Juan spur of the Rocky Mountains in a landscape that Schultheis calls "the most twisted, convoluted, cantankerous, crumpled, moiled, roiled, paradoxical, and one-step-forward-three-steps-back terrain the Great Spirit ... ever conspired to create," Telluride wasn't quite ready for the 20th century when Schultheis arrived in 1973. By the time he and his freewheeling fellow travelers finished putting their touches on the mountain-bound burg, Telluride had become a hippie Shangri-la. The place was so attractive, in fact, that it soon fell victim to the gentrification that had undone so many other rural countercultural havens, and Telluride emerged by the end of the 1980s as one of the West's most expensive and exclusive resorts.

Schultheis, the author of The Hidden West and a longtime correspondent for Outside magazine, offers an entertaining chronicle of the way things used to be in the era of VW vans and Grateful Dead tapes, before big money rolled into town. Even today, he notes, some of the old ways remain: despite new dams and condominiums, he tells us, San Miguel County still lacks a single stoplight--"and as for stop signs, it [is] hard to find one that hadn't been riddled by a shotgun blast or perforated by small-arms fire." Celebrating the landscape and its people without false nostalgia, Schultheis's essays are shot through with good humor and sharp observation, and his book marks a welcome return. --Gregory McNamee