Historical Photos of Colorado Residents Enjoying Their Lives

Did you enjoy a relaxing Labor Day weekend? Did you get out and have some fun? I cleaned the crawl space under my house. While there, three more boxes of classic Robert Grant photos were discovered.

Here's a look at Grand Junction and Western Colorado residents out and about having fun. This gallery includes vintage photos of races, events, boating, and people acting silly.

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Didn't You Say You Were Done With This Project?

For the last 23 years the effort has been underway to find, sort, and digitize my grandpa, Bob Grant's personal photo collection. He was the photographer at the Daily Sentinel for more than 40 years, and in addition to the prints published in the paper, he shot, developed, and kept thousands upon thousands of prints. Those, combined with an absolutely obscene amount of negatives, found their way to his garage after his retirement.

My dad, Bob Grant's son-in-law, Arlie Jordan initiated the monumental task of sorting out and scanning the collection. When he died in 2019, I took it over. Earlier this year, with a mountain of work staring me down, the decision was made to turn over the entire collection to the Museum of the West. At this time, this museum in Grand Junction, Colorado is hard at work putting together a permanent Robert Grant exhibit.

Where Did This Batch of Photos Come From?

You may recall about five months ago I said my part of the project was complete. At that time, it was believed all of Bob Grant's photo collection had been gathered and turned over to the museum.

Along comes Labor Day Weekend 2023, and yours truly decided to do a little housekeeping. Much to my surprise, another three boxes of prints were uncovered. These three boxes, like previous boxes and file cabinets full of tens of thousands of photos, were a random selection of images from around Western Colorado and Eastern Utah.

People Having Fun In Western Colorado

The boxes contained everything from images of people fishing, all the way to major fires and police activity. For the purpose of this gallery, I grabbed a pile of roughly 100 prints and sorted out the fun ones. These are images of people boating, racing, biking, being weird, and having a good time doing it.

Like past galleries, these are prints Bob made that for one reason or another didn't make the cut. They never found their way to the newspaper or one of his calendars. These prints haven't seen the light of day in almost 40 years.

Unfortunately, like most of Bob's prints, since these had no real future, he opted not to include information as the event or subjects. That, though, is part of the fun of these galleries. Look closely, and then, look closer. You're bound to recognize someone you know. It happens every time one of the Bob Grant galleries gets published.