Tuesday, September 8, 2026

The Rio Grande reaches Montrose and the Western Slope gets a timetable

1882 · Montrose

On Sept. 8, 1882, Denver & Rio Grande track came over Cerro Summit and into Montrose, a town that had been staked that January and named for a character in a Walter Scott novel. The rails had already crawled through the Black Canyon. Grand Junction was next.

Joe Selig and a handful of partners had platted the townsite in January 1882, after the Uncompahgre and Tabeguache Utes were forced off the valley and onto a reservation in Utah the previous September. Selig borrowed the name from A Legend of Montrose. By February there was a post office and forty houses. By summer there were fourteen saloon licenses and a hotel Otto Mears put $6,000 into. The railroad was the point of the whole exercise.

The D&RG had left Gunnison in 1881, threaded the Black Canyon past Curecanti Needle, climbed out at Cimarron, and came over Cerro Summit. Wikipedia and the old company timelines put the rails in Montrose on Sept. 8. A local count later said the settlement opened to traffic on the 12th. Either way, that week the Western Slope stopped being a freight wagon argument. Population passed 700 by January. Montrose County was carved out of Gunnison County in 1883. The Ouray branch followed in 1887. Grand Junction saw its first train in November.

The brick depot that still sits by the tracks is a later building, now a museum, which is how a railroad town admits the original wood shack was never going to be the postcard. The line that arrived that September is why peaches, cattle, and mine supplies all learned the same schedule. Palmer had wanted Mexico City. He got Montrose instead, and Montrose turned out to be enough.

Sources: Wikipedia — Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad · Colorado Encyclopedia — Montrose · City of Montrose — History · Colorado Encyclopedia — Montrose County

Denver measures an inch of snow three days after 101 degrees

2020 · Denver International Airport

On Sept. 8, 2020, Denver International Airport officially measured 1.0 inch of snow and a low of 31 degrees. That tied the earliest freeze on the books, first set in 1962. Saturday the official thermometer had read 101. Colorado does not believe in transition weeks.

The heat had spent the weekend showing off. Sept. 5 was 101 at the airport — hottest September reading ever, latest triple-digit day on record. The 6th tied 97. The 7th hit 93, which became the 73rd 90-degree day of the year and the warmest temperature ever posted the day before measurable snow.

Then the fronts stacked up out of Wyoming. By early on the 8th the city was in the low 30s. Snow started in the foothills overnight, mixed on the I-25 corridor in the morning, and finally made it onto the official stick at DIA late in the day: one even inch. NWS Boulder measured 5.6 inches at the office. The mountains took 4 to 10. The foothills 3 to 6. Neighborhoods in town got a slushy dusting and a freeze warning that lasted into Wednesday.

The 31-degree low tied Sept. 8, 1962, which had been the earliest first freeze Denver had ever recorded. The gap from 101 to measurable snow was three days, the shortest on the books. The swing from Monday's 93 to Tuesday's 31 was 62 degrees, a September record nobody asked for. Average first measurable snow here is Oct. 18. Average first freeze is Oct. 7. Sept. 8 is the calendar's way of reminding you that those are averages, not promises.

Pack the fleece next to the sandals. The official thermometer has a sense of humor, and it is not a kind one.

Sources: Denver Post — last time this cold on Sept. 8 · CBS Colorado — 14 records in six days · NWS Boulder — Sept. 8 weather history notes · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 8 records

The last thunderstorm of 1886 pelts Denver with hail the size of beans

1886 · Denver

On Sept. 8, 1886, Denver's last thunderstorm of the season arrived with hail the National Weather Service later described, without poetry, as the size of beans. It dropped 0.81 inch of rain and then packed up until spring. September here has always had a second act.

The Weather Service keeps a straight face about this one. Last thunderstorm of the season. Hail the size of beans. 0.81 inch of precipitation. No epic, no fatality, no broken greenhouse census — just a late-summer storm that decided the growing season had been long enough.

Two years earlier, on the night of the 7th into the 8th, a south wind held at 48 mph and knocked trees over in the city. In 1892 the 8th contributed a trace to the driest September on record. In 1929 the high on this date was 42. In 1962 the low was 31 and the first freeze of the year came early. In 2020 the beans were snowflakes.

What 1886 offers is the ordinary version of a Colorado September: a storm that does its job, files a number, and leaves. The hail was not golf balls. The rain was not a flood. The season still ended on time. If you are looking for a moral, it is only that the calendar on the Front Range has never been a reliable narrator, and the official notes have been saying so in plain language for a century and a half.

Sources: ThorntonWeather / NWS — Sept. 8 to 14 weather history · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 8 records