Back in the Day
The Colorado Legislature officially created Delta County this year, 7 years after statehood.
What is 1883?
Delta County Road & Bridge divides the county into three geographic service areas. Name all three.
What are Delta, Surface Creek, and North Fork?
The Census Bureau's July 1, 2025 estimate puts Delta County's population closest to this number: 22,000, 32,000 or 42,000.
What is 32,000? (32,178)
About this percentage of Delta County's land is public land: 21%, 36%, 51%, or 72%.
What is 51%?
Delta County is governed by this many County Commissioners, all of whom are elected at large.
What is three?
According to 2023 Census data, Delta County had about how many employer establishments: 400, 900, or 1,500?
What is about 900? (878)
Delta County takes its name from the landform created where these two rivers come together.
What are the Gunnison and Uncompahgre Rivers?
Delta County borders exactly three Colorado counties. Name them.
What are Mesa, Gunnison, and Montrose Counties?
Nearly 3 in 10 Delta County residents fall into this age group.
Who are people aged 65 and older? (28.8%)
Delta County has a place in Colorado’s fishing record book. A 5.06-pound fish caught in a Delta County farm pond in 1993 remains the state record for this species.
What is a black bullhead catfish?
Public K–12 education in the county is governed by this entity, not by the County Commissioners.
What is Delta County School District 50J?
Delta County has far more businesses with no paid employees than businesses with employees. In 2023, there were about 1,500, 2,500, or 3,500 self-employed and owner-operated businesses.
What is 3,500? (3,508)
Before the area was opened to settlement in 1881, these Indigenous people had long called the region home.
Who are the Ute people?
The North Fork of the Gunnison River drains headwaters from these two mountain ranges.
What are the Elk Mountains and West Elk Mountains?
Between the 2020 population estimate base and the July 2025 estimate, Delta County's population declined, stayed essentially flat, or grew by about 3%.
What is grew about 3%? (3.1%)
Visitors help fund Delta County tourism through a tax collected primarily on this type of purchase. In 2024, that tourism tax generated nearly $180,000.
What is overnight lodging?
Despite the name, Delta County Libraries is not a department of county government. It is this type of independent local-government entity.
What is a special district / public library district?
In 2022, this sector generated more than $174 million in Delta County, substantially more than accommodation and food services.
What is health care and social assistance?
This fur trader established Fort Uncompahgre near present-day Delta in 1828.
Who was Antoine Robidoux?
This enormous conservation area spans parts of Delta, Mesa, and Montrose counties and includes nearly 30 miles of the Gunnison River.
What is the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area?
Roughly this percentage of Delta County's occupied housing units are owner-occupied: 58%, 68%, or 78%.
What is 78%? (77.9%)
Filed in 1881, this ditch was the first irrigation ditch filing near Delta and helped launch the area's irrigation development.
What is the Garnet Mesa Ditch?
Ambulance service isn't countywide under one organization. These two districts provide the primary ambulance/EMS service in different parts of Delta County.
What are the Delta County Ambulance District and North Fork Ambulance Health Service District/North Fork EMS?
Delta County residents spent nearly $422 million in this category in 2022.
What are retail sales?
Before becoming “Delta” in August 1882, the new town went by this considerably harder-to-spell name.
What is Uncompahgre?
According to Delta County's official statistics, there are this many named lakes and reservoirs in the county.
What is 157?
At 81.9%, this household service still does not reach nearly one in five Delta County households.
What is a broadband internet service?
Garnet Mesa near Delta and Thistle Whistle near Hotchkiss are local examples of this emerging practice that combines solar-energy production with agriculture.
What is agrivoltaics?
Delta County 911 dispatches for five separate fire protection districts. Name all five communities they are based around.
What are Delta, Cedaredge, Hotchkiss, Paonia and Crawford?
A State Demography Office economic-base analysis found this group, rather than agriculture, tourism or mining, was the single largest contributor to Delta County’s economic base.
Who are retirees? (26% in that analysis)