Paradox is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

and a

U.S. Post Office The United States Postal Service (USPS), also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service, is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal serv ...

located in the Paradox Valley, Montrose County,

Colorado Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...

, United States. The Paradox Post Office has the ZIP Code 81429.

Name

The geologist, Albert Charles Peale named Paradox in 1875; he declared that the

Dolores River The Dolores River is a tributary of the Colorado River, approximately long, in the U.S. states of Colorado and Utah. The river drains a rugged and arid region of the Colorado Plateau west of the San Juan Mountains. Its name derives from the Spa ...

had the “desire to perform strange and unexpected things” due to the unusual course of the river. Rather than flowing parallel to the valley, the river runs horizontally across the valley, cutting through cliff walls at 90 degree angles. George R. Eichler wrote in the book, ''Colorado Place Names'', that Paradox was nearly inaccessible to early settlers. To enter the valley, travellers had to disembark to unload their wagons. The wagons were then disassembled, and the pieces were then lowered to the valley on ropes.

History

The Paradox area had originally been home to the

Ute people Ute () are an Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin, Indigenous people of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau in present-day Utah, western Colorado, and northern New Mexico.Pritkzer''A Native American Encyclopedia'' p. 242 Historically, their t ...

. It was later settled by Euro-American ranchers in the 1870's. In 1882, a post office was established. In 1897 mining began, first copper and later uranium. Paradox is a yellowcake boomtown. Uranium ore was first discovered at the Raja mine, and a sample was shipped to

Marie Curie Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie (; ; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), known simply as Marie Curie ( ; ), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was List of female ...

in France, although other sources state that specimens were shipped to Freidel and Cumenge in France for analysis. In 2010

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

magazine featured an article, ''The Uranium Widows'', on the spouses of deceased Paradox uranium workers who died from extended exposure to uranium during their employment in the local mines and mills.

Geography

Paradox is located in Paradox Valley.

Population

In 1991, the population of Paradox was "around two hundred."

References

{{authority control Unincorporated communities in Montrose County, Colorado Unincorporated communities in Colorado