O to the pack burro races

BY DEB HURLEY BROBST DBROBST@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Runners come to Georgetown for the pack burro race, fans come for the burros and Clear Creek Rotary 2000 members come for the burro poop.

e 17th annual pack burro race on May 27 brought 78 participants, some of them local, with others from around Colorado and from Western states, all ready to make the eightmile journey from Georgetown to Empire and back with their fourlegged friends. e fastest time was 1 hour, 13 minutes.

Burro-race fans took lots of photos, petted the pack animals and admired the sight they don’t often see in Georgetown. en there’s Clear Creek Rotary 2000. Why not take the steaming piles left along the road as the burros run by and turn them into a fundraiser? Rotary members mark 600 squares along one block of Sixth Street with painter’s tape, and for $10 per square, viewers can bet that their square will have the largest amount of dung left after the race starts. e winner gets $300; the club gets $5,700 to use for scholarships.

Clear Creek Rotary is an integral part of making sure the Georgetown burro race is something special.

Melissa Keuroglian, the George- town Community School director and a Rotary member, said her rst weekend in Georgetown was Memorial Day 2022, and she attended the burro race.

“It’s been easy to embrace this little town,” she said, “and the burro race is one of the unique things that puts us on the map.”

History of burro racing e Western Pack Burro Ass-ociation (the name is trademarked) was formed more than 50 years ago to better organize the races, track race results, establish guidelines for how competitors should conduct themselves and enforce rules for how burros should be treated, according to the WPBA website. Racing continues to grow across the United States, with races seeing more competitors each year.

Pack burro racing is a sport native to Colorado, though it’s unclear how it originally started. According to social media, the most likely scenario is that two miners found gold and raced with their burros in tow to see who could get to the claims o ce rst. “Burro” is Spanish for “donkey.” In 2012, pack burro racing was named the o cial summer heritage sport in Colorado.

Burro race runners is was Kristin Trapp’s rst time in the Georgetown burro race, though she’s raced elsewhere. e Tucson, Arizona, resident said her son also was participating in the race. “I love to run in them,” she said, noting that her burro Leo was a good donkey. could join EFR.

“My dad always said if you live in Evergreen, you have to be a reghter,” Carrol said.

Marilyn Sandifer, whose husband Bill was a re ghter from 1965 to 1985, attended the barbecue. She said the rst time she was alone with Bill – not a date, she noted –Bill stopped at the re station, and he let her sit in a retruck. “It was a stepping stone” to their long marriage, she said.

The 1970s e retirees talked about the hose cart races in the 1970s, and how Evergreen was the state champion three years in a row, beating other volunteer re departments. A trophy and photos of the team in action are on display in a cabinet in the entry way to the Administration Building. e best part, he added, was working with really good people and doing a good job, noting that “there’s nothing more exciting that running into a burning building.”

Pete Anderson, who served on the department from 1977 to 2007 and is writing the EFR history book, said no calls stand out as he looks back on his 30 years. He explained that some calls were heartbreaking since rst responders tend to see people on their worst day.

Anderson’s father and uncle were charter members of the department.

Rhoda Schleicher, who was among the rst women in the department, joined in 1979, and while some of the older re ghters gave her grief for joining, they realized she was the perfect size to get into attics and crawl spaces, places others couldn’t get into.

“I refused to make co ee,” she said.

She noted that the teamwork