Nick Gray lived for a century and was an institution of Colorado’s Western Slope—but his experiences spanned the world. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal, and he survived malaria. At the conclusion of the war, he returned home and founded Nick Gray Construction Company. His efforts helped build much of the infrastructure for the growing Western Slope, including over 3,000 miles of power line right-of-ways and roads. Most notably, Gray worked to defend the grazing rights of ranchers when the U.S. Forest Service was threatening them in the early 1990s. Nick Gray’s legacy will continue in perpetuity in the form of a trust that he established to support scholarships for college-bound students from the Uncompahgre Valley.