Oddities & curiosities in Grand Junction
Oddity shops, curiosity cabinets and taxidermy counters: 7 of the strangest small storefronts in Grand Junction, GJ Oddities, Palisade Insectary and Two-Story Outhouse among them. The kind of quirky, offbeat retail you leave with a story and a jar of something. They spread across Grand Junction, Palisade, Crested Butte, Paonia and 2 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. 2 of them cost nothing. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
-
GJ Oddities
The first thing you meet is the raven bear — a full black bear rebuilt with wings and unsettling blue eyes, hauled home from a Denver oddities festival. Past it, a family-run strip-mall unit on 9th Street stacked with taxidermy ravens, sheep hearts and brains in jars, a mummified baby iguana, wet-specimen sharks and bats, and a quiet shelf of serial-killer memorabilia. The McManus family opened it because Grand Junction didn't know what oddities were. It does now.
-
Palisade Insectary
Here is the secret between the peach orchards: a state-run bug factory, the oldest of its kind in the country, breeding insects to eat Colorado's weeds. It started in 1945 hunting the Oriental fruit moth and now raises 14 kinds, shipping 4 million a year. The stars: a bindweed mite small enough that gardeners order it by mail, and the tamarisk leaf beetle that cut a riverside invader in half. Free entomologist-led tours run fall through winter, when staff aren't out in the field. You have to call.
-
Two-Story Outhouse
Tucked into the alley between Elk and Maroon Avenues, this hand-hewn wooden outhouse is one of Colorado's last two-story privies from the mining era. The engineering is grimly clever: Crested Butte's snowpack once routinely buried single-story outhouses, so builders stacked two chambers and offset the holes on each floor — upper seat positioned slightly further back than the lower — to keep things from going literally wrong between neighbors. A covered walkway connected the second story directly to the upper floor of the adjacent building, letting residents reach facilities without wading through chest-deep drifts. The structure, painted red, retains both doors and both chambers, and stands as the town's most quietly weird landmark inside a National Historic District that has been preserved since 1974.
-
Alfred Eames Cellars
Buried beneath a working vineyard in Paonia is a concrete wine cave commissioned from an artist out of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — and the only way to see it is to call ahead and ask Alfred or his son Devon to let you in. You taste in their actual work area, surrounded by barrels and the smell of aging Pinot Noir, while one of the two walks you through the cave they built. The property looks like someone's farm first and a winery second, which is exactly the point.
-
Redstone Coke Oven Historic District
In the 1970s, countercultural youth actually moved into the hollow domes — 84 stone beehive coke ovens strung along Highway 133, built in 1899 to turn Crystal River coal into fuel for the Colorado Fuel and Iron steelworks in Pueblo. Most drivers today do exactly what they did back then: glance, maybe slow down, keep going. The Redstone Historical Society is opening a new museum inside one of the original worker homes on the property in 2026, which means the window to see this as a quiet roadside curiosity is closing.
-
Gateway Canyons Resort — Curator of Curiosity Tours
John Hendricks, the man who built the Discovery Channel, carved a resort into the Dolores River canyon and hired a historian-paleontologist named Zebulon Miracle as its full-time Curator of Curiosity. Miracle helicopters guests to a red-rock Fruita mesa where they work alongside professionals at a 150-million-year-old active dig site, pulling actual dinosaur bones from the ground. Back at the resort, the oldest rock layer on the signature Palisade formation clocks in at 290 million years — the canyon walls themselves are the exhibit. This is private access to geology and paleontology that no day-trip or trailhead can replicate.
-
Colterris Winery Barrel Cave
Someone actually bored a cave into a Colorado hillside and filled it with 250 French and American oak barrels — and then decided that was a perfectly reasonable place to hold a sit-down tasting. Colorado's largest estate winery did exactly that on its Palisade property, and you can book a seat inside with De Beque Canyon framing the cave mouth like a painting. The air is cool and smells like wood and wine, and the whole thing feels improbably far from a standard tasting room.
Oddities & curiosities in Grand Junction — FAQ
Which oddity shops & curiosities in Grand Junction are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Colterris Winery Barrel Cave, GJ Oddities and Alfred Eames Cellars. Colterris Winery Barrel Cave — Someone actually bored a cave into a Colorado hillside and filled it with 250 French and American oak barrels — and then decided that was a perfectly reasonable place to hold a sit-down tasting.
Where in Grand Junction are they?
Across Grand Junction, Palisade, Crested Butte, Paonia and Redstone and 1 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Are any of the oddity shops & curiosities in Grand Junction free?
Yes — 2 are free to visit, including Two-Story Outhouse and Redstone Coke Oven Historic District. The rest are mostly low-cost.
Is this a good weird date in Grand Junction?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Colterris Winery Barrel Cave, for instance: Book the cave tasting experience through Tock, then wander the estate vineyard with whatever bottle you just decided you needed.
How were these oddity shops & curiosities chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Grand Junction guide.