The town of Rangely straddles the White River Valley, amid the mesas and mountains of the Book Cliffs Range in Northwestern Colorado. At almost exactly a mile in altitude, Rangely is remote and quiet, the nearest urban centers--Grand Junction, Colorado, and Vernal, Utah--an hour or more away. The town once had a stoplight, at the corner of Main Street and White Avenue, but decided it wasn’t necessary and took it out.

The surrounding country is high desert plateau. In summer the town with its tree canopy along the river appears as a meandering green corridor. The wild space beyond Rangely is mostly public land, millions of acres of canyons and cliffs, studded with cedar and juniper.

For thousands of years, the Ute people and their forebears, called the Fremont, inhabited the area and left many sites with pictographs and petroglyphs, including the Carrotmen site--a line-up of spectral watchers--and the celebrated Waving Hands, now protected as part of the Canyon Pintado Historic District.

In 1909 a crew of paleontologists hired by Andrew Carnegie found eight dinosaur tailbones protruding from a sandstone hill above the Duchesne River in the region. By 1923, they had removed 350 tons of fossils from the site, which is now part of Dinosaur National Monument, just north of Rangely.

Rangely itself was founded as a town by Chevron in 1946, after the discovery of what was then the largest oil field in America. Chevron officially departed Rangely in 2022, with the oil field largely depleted. Rangely now looks to tourism and other sources to replace its dependence on the fossil fuel industry. With a gigabyte internet infrastructure, one source has been online workers. In 2021, Rangely was ranked among the top 25 "Best Work from Home Cities” in the US.

Rangely’s motto is “Way Outside of Ordinary,” which fits The TANK exactly. We love it here. The TANK Center for Sonic Arts would not exist without support from the Town Council, the Rangely Chamber of Commerce, and local businesses like Urie Trucking, W.C. Streigel, the Rangely True Value and the Blue Mountain Inn and Suites.

The TANK’s mission statement makes a specific commitment to serving Rangely. Its recording program serves area musicians, sonic artists and ordinary folks, coaches them in making their own music in The TANK, and gives them a professional quality recording of the results. More basic and informal is The Tank's free, Open Saturdays program, popular with locals, who often come together to sing in The TANK, as featured in a 2016 CBS Sunday Morning segment about the place. Each season The TANK produces two major concerts at nominal ticket prices and about eight free concerts. It also produces offsite free concerts in the local assisted living center, the town park, the local schools and elsewhere.

More at Discover Rangely.

Go Panthers!