By Ethan Wood
Since Ouray attracts many tourists, it is only normal that students would be affected by it. With tourism starting to slow down now, students are eager to vent about their experiences.
Junior Aaron Pitts has no fear of speaking his mind on any topic, so he gave some great insight into student working conditions with tourists in the time of covid. There was a moment over the summer, he said, when a man “was putting his face right through the covid shield of the ice cream shop I work in.” This caused a small confrontation of Aaron having to tell the man that if he did not “take your head out I’m not serving you ice cream.”
Sophomore Calder Green complained that tourists seem oblivious of local drivers. “They don’t wait for you to pull into a turning lane,” he said, “and when you start to make your turn, they run out into the street to get across leaving you in oncoming traffic.” Science teacher Beth Lakin added that the biggest change in tourist season comes when she is “emerging from the mountains,” and sees that there are “a lot of cars,” she said: “They don’t know how to drive on Red Mountain pass.”
Junior Clifford Utech said his “feelings are mixed” when it comes to tourism, and that he doesn’t “like a lot of them.” In his work at San Juan Mountain Guides, he said he was not “affected that much,” but he does see that tourists are often “are rude to waiters” and believes that “if you come to this town you have to treat people and workers with respect.”
Sophomore Caleb Crandall works as a food runner at the Ouray brewery, and said that he has experienced that disrespect from tourists. “99% percent of the time they are annoying,” he said, “and that other 1% you don’t even see them.”
But, argued Clifford, “you have to just bite the bullet sometimes,” because in the end they “do bring in a large amount of money to Ouray.”
Caleb acknowledged that they do “bring in a big surge of money during the summer, spring, and winter months,” but said he still finds them “annoying. I’ve slowly grown angry from every summer of them standing in the middle of the road and taking pictures.”