872. Dove Creek, Dolores County (CO58)

I don’t especially like to speak ill of courthouses (unless they’re egregiously bad), but I feel that the Dolores County Courthouse speaks for itself. It’s definitely not in my top ten (which, now that I say that, I may have to compose a top ten courthouse list someday), but it’s also not in my bottom ten courthouses either (ditto on the list making). It’s definitely below average but, based on the date it was built, what exactly could I expect? The 1950s were not exactly a watershed time for courthouse design. I therefore give this courthouse a resounding “meh.”

I had to put a lot of faith in this cache; there were only seventeen in Dolores County and only one in Dove Creek proper. And since Dove Creek is in the far west of the county, I’d have had to do a whole lot of backtracking if it wasn’t there to find something else. With the sun getting low, a lot of options were not realistic (no, I’m not normally climbing a mountain at the best of times, much less in the last rays of the dying sun). So what choice did I have but to hope the CO wouldn’t let me down? When I got to GZ, I was looking for something magnetic, but there was a suspicious piece of wood with a rock on top of it instead. I gently nudged them over with my toe to reveal the object of my desire! I guess the magnetic one had gone by the wayside over the years. Once it was signed and returned, I got back on the highway, driving directly into the sun. While I was out there in Western Colorado, I had some other things to do that would make my life easier when I went back to work on Utah. I drove into the Beehive State, bound for…