Rico's Nine-Year Trail Project Is Suddenly $69,000 From Done

Walk down Glasgow Avenue on a Tuesday morning this August and Fireweed's doors will be locked. That's new. For most of the café's life, the only day off you needed to plan around in Rico was whatever the weather was doing. Now it's Tuesday, every week, no exceptions.

That's a small detail, and it only matters if you're paying attention to a town where five or six commercial doors on one street carry the entire weight of daily errands. It's not the biggest change in Rico this year, either. That one sits about four miles south of Glasgow Avenue, where a trail that's been nine years in the making just got $69,000 closer to finished.

The café that changed hands without losing a beat

Fireweed Café and Mercantile opened in the spring of 2020, when founders Chelsey Rajavuori and Matt Guertin decided a remote mining town in the middle of a pandemic still needed a place with good coffee and a shelf of local groceries. A little more than five years later, this past March, they sold it to Emily Thorn, who spent close to two decades in the Durango-Silverton-Dolores triangle working as an environmental consultant before deciding her next chapter looked more like flour and espresso than watershed reports.

Thorn kept the backbone of what made the place work. The Forest Mushroom Latte is still on the menu. So is the Road Hana smoothie. The bread is still baked in house. What she changed was the schedule. These days the café opens as early as 6:30 in the morning and closes by 3:30 in the afternoon, every day except Tuesday. If you've been treating Fireweed as a place to swing by after work, that habit needs an update.

"Rico is where I've chosen to be, and where I hope to be forever."

That's Thorn, in her own words on the café's website. In a town with this few commercial anchors, a new owner saying that out loud carries more weight than it would somewhere with fifty restaurants to absorb one closing. Telluride News covered the sale back in June, and six months in, the café looks less like a handoff and more like a continuation.

The bar that's outlasted the mine it's named after

If Fireweed is Rico's newest ownership story, the Enterprise Bar and Grill on North Glasgow is its oldest. The building has operated as a bar for more than 130 years, which by most counts makes it the sixth oldest bar in Colorado. It opened as the Metropole before getting renamed for the Enterprise, the most productive silver mine of Rico's 1890s boom. The dollar bills stapled to the ceiling and the pinball machines in back are recent additions by the standards of a building that's been pouring drinks since before Colorado had paved roads to Telluride.

The Enterprise keeps hours Fireweed no longer does, open until 9 p.m. most weeknights and from noon on weekends, which makes it the default answer for dinner when Prospector, the small fine-dining spot tucked behind the Rico Hotel, isn't the plan. Add Bae Brother's Southern Soul Kitchen a few doors down and Silver Creek, another name on the same short strip, and that's close to the full list of what's currently open for a meal on this stretch of Glasgow Avenue. It's a short list. Every name on it is doing real work.

The bridge nine years in the making

The bigger story this year isn't on Glasgow Avenue at all. It's at a bend in the Dolores River, about four miles south of town, where a railroad bridge crossed the water more than a hundred years ago.

The Rico Trails Alliance formed in the winter of 2017 with one specific goal: build a river corridor trail along the abandoned Rio Grande Southern railroad grade, running 4.7 miles from town to the Montezuma-Dolores county line. Most of that distance has been cleared and built over the past several years, largely by volunteers, working through Forest Service reviews, a cultural assessment required for federal trail designation, and a formal easement with a private landowner south of town.

What's been missing the whole time is one bridge, built where the historic RGS railroad crossing, known as Bridge 68A, once stood next to a set of stone coke ovens still standing along the river today. Without it, the trail simply stops at the water, and anyone trying to reach the Ryman Creek or Salt Creek trailheads, both of which connect into the Colorado Trail, still has to ride or walk along Highway 145 to get there.

In March, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission approved a $250,000 grant for the bridge at its meeting in Westminster. Combined with what RTA has already raised on its own, that leaves the organization roughly $69,000 short of its full $319,000 goal, which covers the bridge and two remaining trail sections on the north end that RTA is targeting for completion across 2026 and 2027. Trail crews were still out in June clearing brush at the future bridge site near the Rico cemetery, work documented by the local news site Ore Cart, which named Ridgway-based bridge builder Chris Haaland of Canyon Bridge as the contractor on the job. Ore Cart has followed this project since the Forest Service first signed off on trail clearing back in 2022.

Nine years is a long time to wait on one bridge. What it completes isn't just a shortcut, though. The corridor runs past old railroad ties, telegraph poles, and the same coke ovens from the mining era, which means the same project that gets riders and hikers off Highway 145 also turns a stretch of local mining history into something you walk your kids past on a Saturday morning instead of something you drive by at 45 miles an hour.

What this actually changes if you live here

If you're on Silver Creek or up above the river, this is the year the math finally tipped in the trail's favor. A finished bridge means no more choosing between a steep, technical climb or a stretch of Highway 145 traffic to reach the Colorado Trail system. RTA also grooms the town's Nordic trails through the winter, so once this corridor connects, it opens up cross-country skiing terrain that currently requires driving to reach.

None of this shows up if you're just passing through on 145 between Telluride and Cortez. The bridge won't be visible from the highway. Fireweed's new Tuesday closure won't matter to someone stopping for twenty minutes on a road trip. That's the point. The two real changes in Rico this year, a café that survived a sale and a trail gap that finally has a funding number attached to it, are both things you'd only notice if you actually live here. That's usually the best way to tell whether a small town is standing still or moving. This one is moving, just slowly enough that you'd miss it if you weren't watching Glasgow Avenue and the river at the same time.

If this is already home and you're curious what a decade of trail work and a quiet change of ownership on Main Street might mean for property here, or you just want to talk through what's actually open these days, Regents Real Estate Group knows this stretch of the San Juans well. If you've been wondering what your place near Rico is worth, our free home valuation takes a few minutes and gives you a straight answer, no pressure attached.