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Gunnison, Colorado
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Lying between the Sawatch Range and the Elk Mountains, this mountain town is surrounded by the Gunnison National Forest. The landscape around Gunnison is dominated by rocky ridges and rolling, sagebrush-covered hills. Mountain bikers love this area, with the rocky, technical trails offered at Hartman Rocks and the mellow, scenic trail system at Signal Peak. With more than 1,000 miles of dirt roads in the Gunnison Valley, all this makes it a convenient base camp for gravel cyclists.
Gunnison is also a college town, home to Western State Colorado University, a small public university that offers more than 100 areas of study including an engineering partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder.
Being located at the bottom of a valley, and due to its central location in the Rocky Mountains, cold air from the surrounding high mountains settles into Gunnison's valley at night, making it the coldest valley in winter in the continental United States, especially when snowpack is present. It truely is the ice box of America! This kind of cooling event actually happens in all of the high mountain valleys of Colorado, but it just doesn't get as frigid in the other hamlets as it gets in Gunnison. With that noted, the coldest temperature ever recorded here was −47°F (−44°C) on December 25, 1924. It can also get hot in Gunnison, with its hottest temperature recorded being 105°F (41°C) on August 3, 1894. Snowfall wise, with the Gunnison Valley being on the dry side, not as much snow falls here as you might think, with their annual amount seeing an average of 45.5 inches (115 cm) per snow season, but thanks to the cold, snow remains on the ground in town for entire winters in most snow seasons - from as early as November to as late as April, making it seem like a very snowy place, indeed!
  US-50: 0.8 mi E of N Main St/CO-135 Gunnison: Looking East (from CDOT) |
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