Yes — and I think your memory makes perfect sense. Ridgway was there, but it was a remarkably easy place to pass through without registering as a town, especially in the period you were driving that road.
Ridgway was founded in 1891 as a railroad town and became the junction of the Denver & Rio Grande and Otto Mears's Rio Grande Southern, primarily because it was the railhead serving Ouray and the mines toward Telluride. But its railroad importance disappeared long before your childhood. The Ridgway–Ouray railroad ended in 1953, and the Montrose–Ridgway line survived only until 1976.
And there's the particularly interesting part: the original town was nearly destroyed by fires in the 1930s. What survived was essentially a small rural community rather than the bustling railroad town it had once been.
So if you were making the drive from Montrose to Ouray repeatedly as a kid, you weren't imagining some conspicuous little Western town that you inexplicably forgot. The road simply went through the Uncompahgre Valley, and Ridgway was — and to some extent still is — a rather modest settlement sitting at the junction with what is now Colorado 62. Even today, Ouray County describes US 550 as running roughly along the Uncompahgre River, with Ridgway at the intersection with CO 62.
There's also a wonderful historical wrinkle in the article you linked. Ralph Lauren didn't discover some famous ranch called Ridgway Ranch. In 1982 he was apparently told about an old barn on a property outside Ridgway. He and Ricky went to see the nearly century-old Vance barn, liked the country, and bought the property. That original attraction eventually became the 17,000-acre Double RL Ranch.
And that barn really is something: built in 1905, about 60 feet high and 80 by 70 feet, specifically to cope with the enormous snowfalls at the Vance homestead.
So your childhood road and Lauren's ranch actually intersect in a rather nice way: you were repeatedly driving past the country that eventually became the setting for his carefully constructed version of the Old West, without the place itself apparently making much impression on you. And given what you've said about wandering around that plateau country, I suspect you were paying attention to the country, not whether a collection of buildings had a name.
Also, I love the historical irony that the town you don't remember was founded specifically to be an important transportation center—and then, by the time you were wandering around there, had become sufficiently insignificant that you could drive through it a hundred times and not remember it.
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