Do you struggle remembering which one-way street in downtown Grand Junction goes west and which one goes east?
A reliable method is knowing first where you want to end up because Pitkin Avenue travels eastward, toward Pitkin County, which is home to Aspen, and Ute Avenue travels westward, toward Utah.
A section of the Interstate 70 Business Loop, Pitkin Avenue begins around Second Street and ends at 14th Street and Ute Avenue begins at 15th Street, ending around First Street. The two street names are taken from western Coloradoâs late-1800s history and are part of the original town plat, designed in 1881 by the Grand Junction Town and Improvement Company, which was headed by entrepreneur George Crawford.
During the 35 years that Alfred Alvine âAlâ Look served as advertising manager and sometime columnist for The Daily Sentinel, he established a well-deserved reputation as a sort of Renaissance Man.
However, few people know that Look also had a brief career as a silent film star. He appeared in one motion picture, called âThe Love of a Navajo,â which was filmed in New Mexico in 1922.
In addition to his work at the Sentinel, Al Look was an author of multiple books, an amateur paleontologist who had a fossil mammal named after him, an amateur archaeologist who helped define a key ancient Indian site in Utah that still bears his name, and was a self-taught geologist.
In January, 1947, fruit growers in the Grand Valley were preparing to ship by rail freshly harvested peaches from Palisade to locations around the country.
There werenât any fresh peaches in January, of course. That fruit wouldnât be ready to harvest for another eight or nine months.
But another critical commodity was being harvested that winter and shipped to Grand Junction in preparation for the peach harvest to come.
Ice.
When harvest time arrived, ice-cooled railroad cars called reefers, âwere pre-iced in Grand Junction to ensure the fruit was cooled when loaded into the car,â wrote Matt Darling in his book âThe History of Railroads in Palisade, Colorado.â The book was published by the Palisade Historical Society and was released late last year.