Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Ouray, CO

Ouray is a home rule municipality and the county seat of Ouray County, Colorado, in the San Juan Mountains of the state's southwest.

The town was incorporated on October 2, 1876, and named after Chief Ouray of the Ute tribe, and it became the seat of the newly formed Ouray County on March 8, 1877.

The city population was 898 at the 2020 census, down from 1,000 in 2010 and well below its mining-boom peak of 2,534 residents in 1890.

At the 2010 census, Ouray had 457 households and 800 housing units, a housing stock much larger than its year-round population because of second homes.

Ouray sits at an elevation of 7,792 feet at the narrow head of a valley enclosed on three and a half sides by steep mountains, a setting that earned it the nickname "Switzerland of America."

Prospectors arrived in the area in 1875, and at the height of mining Ouray had more than 30 active mines in the surrounding mountains.

The town's most famous operation, Thomas Walsh's Camp Bird Mine, opened in 1897 and produced over one million ounces of gold by 1916 and about 1.5 million troy ounces of gold and 4 million ounces of silver over its life, making it the second-largest gold mine in Colorado.

The Denver and Rio Grande Railway arrived in Ouray on December 21, 1887, but the last regularly scheduled passenger train ran in 1930 and the line to Ridgway was abandoned in 1953.

The entirety of Ouray's Main Street is a National Historic District of late-nineteenth-century buildings, and the Beaumont Hotel and the Ouray City Hall and Walsh Library are individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ouray is home to the Ouray Ice Park, the world's first ice climbing park, where dozens of frozen waterfalls are farmed each winter along more than a mile of the Uncompahgre Gorge, and the town hosts an annual Ice Festival.