Brief by Central Staff
Local Lore – February 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
In the January edition, we published a short quiz about slogans, and promised to run the answers if we remembered. Our mental circuits did suffer greatly from the shock of the monthly bill from the Greedy Gas Co. (which was once owned by the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow), but have since recovered to this extent:
1) Cloud City: Leadville.
2) A Park for All Seasons: South Park, Park County, or Fairplay.
3) Sportsmen’s Paradise: Kremm ling.
4) Fruit Capital of the North Fork: Paonia.
5) Land of Cool Sunshine: Alamosa or the San Luis Valley.
6) North Gateway to the Prosperous San Luis Valley: Saguache.
(We once asked Dean Coombs, publisher of the Saguache Crescent, how to get to the “prosperous San Luis Valley,” as opposed to the one we always ended up in. He said we should seek wisdom from a guru in Crestone, since as far as he know, only the “enlightened” could see the prosperous Valley.)
7) Smile High City: Buena Vista. When we arrived in 1978, there was a billboard to that effect at the junction of U.S. 24 and U.S. 285 south of town.
8) Colorado’s Choice City. Fort Collins, back in the 1970s.
9) The People’s Republic of Boulder, also known as 42 square miles surrounded by reality.
10) Crossroads of the Rockies: Poncha Springs. Geologist Paul Martz, who lives there, said that the earth’s crust is so thin and unstable hereabouts (Rio Grande Rift, hot springs, major faults, etc.) that it should be “Crosshairs of the Rockies.”
11) Now This is Colorado: Chaffee County.
12) Gateway to the Rocky Mountains: Jefferson County. The sign seems weird when we’re eastbound and the county is serving as “Gateway to the Cities of the Plains.” We’d suggest “Land of Many Stupid Zones,” but it’s unlikely to appear on any signs.
13) Queen City of the Plains: Denver. Tom Noel, a historian who sometimes gives tours of Denver’s vintage downtown sites, has been known to refer to it as “The Plain City of the Queens.”
14) Little Texas: Lake City. This could be stretched to Hinsdale County.
15) Pride City: Pueblo.
16) Switzerland of America: Ouray.
Want another quiz? Try to tie these intersections (i.e., Colfax and Broadway would be Denver) to the appropriate settlement:
1) Alder and Copper
2) Teller and Virginia
3) Teller and Illinois
4) Gunnison and Pine
5) Hemlock and Third
6) Cyanide and Seventh
7) Agate and Zero
8) Ouray and Antero
9) Fourth and Front
10) Harrison and Pine
11) San Juan and Second
12) San Juan and Second
HINTS: They’re all incorporated towns or cities in Colorado. Most of them are in Central Colorado or the San Luis Valley — the others are small towns in the mountains. No municipality is repeated.
