The man who always seemed to have a camera slung around his neck walked into David Mullings’ office one day in 1997, introduced himself to the then-publisher of the Ouray County Plaindealer and asked if he had 10 minutes.

He described how he had fallen in love with Ouray many years back, and that he wanted to chronicle the places he visited and people he met through art.

His proposal: Draw a sketch of those places and people and publish it weekly in the newspaper. The visitor, it turns out, had ...