Trade traffic & crowds for relaxed family adventure!
Sledding • Skating Weekend Bonfires
Ski, Snowshoe, or Snowmobile on our 255+ miles of groomed Backcountry Tails
Affordable Gear Rentals
$89 tickets to ski Wolf Creek (’the Most Snow in CO!’)
ISSUE NO. 71 WINTER 2024
16 Room with a View
Hike, bike or ski to the 10th Mountain Huts for the views and stay for lessons about what made this country great.
By Peter Moore
The mystery of gold prospector Alfred Packer and the many lies he told the Indian agency southwest of Gunnison.
By Matt Masich
Publisher & Executive Editor Chris Amundson
Associate Publisher Angela Amundson
Creative Director
Darren Smith
Senior Editor Tom Hess
Photography Coordinator
Amber Kissner
After silver prices collapsed, three Colorado towns followed different paths. Some prospered, others perished.
By Tom Hess
A horse sanctuary at Livermore honors the memor y of a horse-loving daughter.
By Lisa Truesdale
Production Assistant Victoria Finlayson
Advertising Sales
Marilyn Koponen, Katie Shannon
Subscription Services
Carol Butler, Janice Sudbeck
Colorado Life Magazine PO Box 270130 Fort Collins, CO 80527 970-480-0148
ColoradoLifeMag.com
Subscriptions are 1 year (6 issues) for $30 or 2 years (12 issues) for $52. Please call, visit ColoradoLifeMag.com, or return a subscription card from this issue. For fundraising and corporate rates, call or email subscriptions@ coloradolifemag.com.
ADVERTISE
Advertising deadlines are three months prior to publication dates. For rates and position availability, please call or email advertising@ coloradolifemag.com.
CONTRIBUTE
Send us your letters, stories, photos and story tips by writing to us, visiting ColoradoLifeMag. com or emailing editor@coloradolifemag.com.
COPYRIGHT
All text, photography and artwork are copyright 2024 by Flagship Publishing Inc. For reprint permission, please call or email publisher@coloradolifemag.com.
Built in 1900, Fritz Hut is one of two 10th Mountain Division huts in the Hunter-Frying Pan Wilderness, near Aspen. Story begins on page 16.
DRIGGERS
Grand Junction, pg. 62
Telluride, pg. 14
Teller City, pg. 32
Vail, pg. 18
Aspen, pg. 32
Leadville, pg. 18, 32
Cañon City, pg. 8
Livermore, pg. 46
Loveland, pg. 54
Cripple Creek, pg. 8
Lake City, pg. 24
Monte Vista, pg. 52 Alamosa, pg. 8
8 Sluice Box
Donkeys rule Cripple Creek; read your way down Colorado’s highways; and the myth of the king of grizzlies.
Navigate the twists and turns of this quiz on Colorado’s ski resorts.
A Colorado landscape photographer caught a “sun dog” near Telluride.
Fresh powder stirs the imagination of Colorado poets.
42 Kitchens
Creative takes on pasta and pizza please picky palates.
Go. See. Do.
Sandhill cranes in San Luis Valley offer uplifting sight; cash in on an exhibit about money in Loveland; and more events across the state.
Winter conditions offer some chilly challenges for intrepid campers.
The Colorado National Monument exemplifies the Western Slope’s varied climate moods.
Cripple Creek’s resident donkeys roam freely throughout town. Visitors feed them carrots, apples, celery and oats through their car windows, but they’re discouraged from offering “people food.”
Fby LISA HUTCHINS
rom late spring through early fall, shaggy, free-range donkeys roam the historic gold-mining town of Cripple Creek, sauntering down sidewalks, mingling with pedestrians and sticking their heads through open windows and doorways to demand treats. Sometimes they let loose with an ear-splitting bray, demonstrating why they earned the ironic nickname of Rocky Mountain canaries.
The non-profit group Two Mile High Club has looked after the donkey herd for nearly a century. Caretaking volunteers tend to the donkeys in winter, when they’re sheltered in a pasture.
The release of the 15 donkeys is an annual cele-bray-tion in May. The donkeys bolt for the streets, happy to be running free. The caretakers offer healthy food that eager tourists can give to the herd: apples, carrots, celery and oats.
These donkeys have a pretty sweet life, especially compared to their hardworking ancestors. During Cripple Creek’s heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was the richest mining district in America, the town’s tough, nimble donkeys transported millions of dollars in gold ore out of the mines. President Theodore Roosevelt took notice on a visit to the town, reportedly encouraging townspeople to give the donkeys a permanent home as thanks for their service.
When modern mechanization rendered the donkeys obsolete, they were turned loose with a thanks and a slap on the rump. The herd never left. Today their descendants enjoy a unique sovereignty –ambassadors of the town, neither wild nor domesticated, protected by state law and beholden to no one.
Each donkey is whip-smart with its own personality. For the last years of her life, Herbie, the herd’s late matriarch, was on
by TOM HESS
Ta special diet that the club had to personally administer. The old girl would show up every day and knock on his door with a hoof to receive her rations. “I still have dents on my front door to this day,” said Clinton Cline, past president of Two Mile High Club. Reigning alpha male Sheamus is well known for figuring out how to open a gate’s latch so he can raid flower beds.
The Two Mile High Club puts on fundraiser events to pay for the donkeys’ feed and care, raising about $30,000, and spending $2,000 on each donkey.
If you visit the donkeys, there are just a few basic rules:
Don’t feed them “people food.”
Place food flat on your palm, keeping fingers together. Gentle petting is allowed, but don’t put anything – especially not a child – on a donkey’s back.
Above all, mind your manners: In Cripple Creek, harassing or mistreating donkeys is a jailable offense.
he name Tom Noel, a.k.a., Dr. Colorado, is on the cover for 48 books, each of them a deep dive into Colorado history. Now he’s written a foreword for a next-generation observer of Colorado life, author Peter Anderson, whose newest anthology, Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide, covers every region of the state.
Noel says that Anderson’s collection of authors – A-listers and lesser-knowns – and the variety of entries – non-fiction and fantasy – help make Colorado places extraordinary.
in his book Country Editor’s Boy (1970). Anderson quotes from this passage: “April, on those plains, can be a season all by itself ... The melt begins. Spring rains come. Melt and rain combine to create shallow ponds in every upland swale and hollow … it was worth enduring the winter just to emerge into this.”
Anderson started out on his three-month quest for literary nuggets from his home on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley and logged 3,500 miles in an old Chevy with 120,000 miles on the odometer. He brought back folders of maps, brochures and copied book pages that would make for memorable entries.
Reading Colorado arranges excerpts by region and highways. Contributors range from Mark Twain and Ursula Le Guin to Colorado-based writers.
The late New York Times writer Hal Borland, raised in Flagler, published childhood memories of spring on the Eastern Plains
Telluride author Rob Schultheis writes mainly about America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Anderson’s book quotes a passage from Schultheis’ tribute to high-country outdoor living, Fool’s Gold. He’s just returned from the summit of Ajax Peak, a 12er in San Miguel County, racing ahead of a storm, and records an unforgettable moment. “A rainbow appears over the Telluride Valley. Another rainbow appears inside it. Then another. Then a fourth. People come out into Main Street, from the bars, shops, and offices, whooping and hollering.”
As Noel says, that kind of eloquent writing makes Telluride (and Colorado) memorable.
Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide, By Peter Anderson Bower House 456 pages, paperback, $22
by ERIC PETERSON
As the legend goes, Old Mose was a monstrous grizzly bear who menaced the mountains of south-central Colorado from the 1870s to early 1900s. The bear was said to have killed three men and several hundred head of livestock, shaking off numerous bullet wounds and the loss of two toes to a 50-pound trap in the process.
Rancher Wharton Pigg made a mission of hunting the bear after it killed a few of his cattle, including a Hereford bull that it dragged a half-mile across the pasture. After an unsuccessful 1887 hunt, Pigg said the hulking Old Mose looked like “an elephant covered with hair.”
Newspaper headlines declared victory when hunter James Anthony finally shot and killed the beast in 1904: “Death of Old Mose, Terror of Stockmen,” reported the Cañon City Times The Denver Post echoed, “The King of the Grizzlies is Dead.”
Colorado writer Emma Ghent Curtis published a poem about Old Mose in 1905, telling “a story as grim as an ogre’s whim and wild as a were-wolf tale,” in which the bear terrorized ranchers with its “cursed trap-marked paw and ravenous maw.”
The real Old Mose wasn’t the villain he was made out to be. “The truth is the legend of Old Mose is almost all myth,” wrote James Perkins in Old Mose: King of the Grizzlies. The various human and livestock deaths were likely the handiwork of numerous bears over the course of 30 years, Perkins said. Old Mose just happened to be around to take the fall.
Coloradans in 1904 were hellbent on eradicating grizzlies. The state’s population dropped from about 800 grizzlies in 1880 to zero in 1980. The last confirmed grizzly sighting in Colorado came in 1979, when Ed Wiseman killed a bear in hand-to-claw combat near Pagosa Springs (“Grizzly Attack,” CL September/October 2015).
A female black bear killed a Durango woman who was walking her dogs in 2021. Evidene showed that searchers had found the attacking bear and her
two cubs. They were euthanized. A sheep herder received head injuries after a 2023 bear attack in the San Juan National Forest in La Plata County, the first bear attack there since 2021.
The bears fight on in Alamosa, where the Grizzlies are the mascot at Adams State University, and a super-sized bronze statue of Old Mose dominates Grizzly Courtyard.
“The saga of Old Mose conjures up sadness more that anything else,” said Jeff Myers, director of the San Luis Valley Museum. “The extirpation of grizzly bears has reverberated through Colorado and the Rockies. We need a better understanding of our ecosystem and how sensitive the balance is. The tale involves a hungry bear struggling to survive in the face of human encroachment.”
Colorado grown. Colorado crafted. Eat and drink local at Snowy Peaks Winery.
SNOWY PEAKS WINERY
From locally-made cheeses and charcuterie to smallbatch, hand-crafted Colorado wine, we’ve got your Colorado fix in our Estes Park tasting room. Support local. Drink Colorado!
by BEN KITCHEN
GENERAL DEW
1 In what cooking competition did the chefs make the best meals of their lives at the Aspen Mountain Club?
2
Experience the splendor of the Rockies at Aspen Winds. The secluded setting along Fall River, among the aspen and pines, offers a relaxing atmosphere. Aspen Winds is located minutes from Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. We offer one and two bedroom suites and in-room spa suites.
Kitchen/Kitchenettes • Gas Fireplaces Fire Pit • Free WiFi • Cable/Blue-ray DVD No Pets • Non-smoking 970-586-6010 • 1-800-399-6010 1051 Fall River Court • Estes Park
What’s the closest ski resort to Denver? It’s about 20 miles closer than the second-closest, Loveland.
3
Keystone’s website boasts that their Lakeside Village has views not of the lake, but of what geographic line that dictates which ocean water flows to?
4
Which Colorado resort is probably best known to nonColoradans for hosting the X-Games every year since 2002? Despite the name, a breakfast event currently held on the mountain serves French toast instead of pancakes.
5
Name the restaurant at the Telluride Ski Resort whose description on the resort’s website includes the following definition of their two-word French name: “one who enjoys a sociable and luxurious lifestyle, living well, the good life.”
6
Some resorts lack onsite lodging, instead advising visitors to spend the night in a nearby town. Which of the following resorts does offer onsite lodging?
a. Arapahoe Basin
b. Eldora
c. Powderhorn
7
Monarch Mountain is home to two terrain parks. The easier of the two is called Tilt. What’s the name of the more advanced one, also the nickname of a U.S. city?
a. Rip City
b. Steel City
c. Windy City
8
Depending on who’s doing the counting, which of the following states has fewer ski resorts than Colorado?
a. California
b. Michigan
c. New York
9
Which of the following is the name of one of the mountains in Winter Park? The resort’s website indicates that the peak was named long before Colorado legalized marijuana.
a. Doobie Mountain
b. Grass Mountain
c. Mary Jane Mountain
10
Copper Mountain hosts the Winter Dew Tour, a skiing and snowboarding contest sponsored by Mountain Dew. The final event of the 2024 iteration, Superpipe High Air and Best Trick Jam, is presented by what appropriate organization?
a. U.S. Air Force
b. Boeing
c. Southwest Airlines
Experience historic charm at Frisco Lodge. Our exceptional hospitality, a ernoon wine and cheese, award winning courtyard, outdoor hot tub and romantic replace are just a few reasons our guests rated us the #1 bed & breakfast in Frisco and all of Summit County!
See why our guests think we’re the best
11
The record has since been shattered, but two official world record ski jumps were recorded at Howelsen Hill Ski Area in Steamboat Springs in the 1910s.
12
The highest elevation ski resort in Colorado is Silverton Mountain, which has skiable terrain above 14,000 feet above sea level.
13
While the end of Dumb and Dumber is supposed to take place in Aspen, the movie wasn’t filmed there. For example, the ski resort Harry visits is actually Copper Mountain.
14
Confusingly, Loveland is nowhere near the Loveland Ski Area. Even more confusingly, the closest town to the Loveland Ski Area is called Love Land.
15
Colorado’s largest ski resort by area is Vail, which is so large it covers about 1 percent of Colorado’s total area.
No peeking, answers on page 60.
www.friscolodge.com
1-970-668-0195
321 Main St | Frisco, CO
When Colorado Life readers praise the magazine, it’s almost always about the beautiful photography. Do you have the eye and skill to capture Colorado? Submit your photos for possible publication.
Email photos@coloradolifemag.com 970-480-0148 coloradolifemag.com/contribute
parted, he was ready
photograph by WHIT RICHARDSON
Colorado landscape photographers know that high country weather is mercurial, with weird light created by an oncoming storm, and only a moment or two to capture it. That’s what Whit Richardson experienced one winter morning above Telluride.
Richardson had been photographing the exterior of a palatial new home when the storm sky began to lighten. He had a hunch, hurriedly attaching a longer lens to his camera, and just in time.
Sure enough, for only a minute or two, light burst through the approaching storm. And then the storm clouds burned off. The sun came out. The moment was gone.
Later, Richardson looked at his four handheld exposures. “The rainbow was extremely bright,” he said. The images were similar, but he chose one to process in Photoshop because is was not too dark and not too light – a Goldilocks image.
That’s the challenge of photographing what is called parhelia, also called sun dogs or mock suns – sunlight that is refracted by ice crystals in the atmosphere, in this case, the air above the San Juan Mountains.
IN EACH ISSUE, Top Take features a reader’s photograph of Colorado. Submit your best photos for the chance to be published in Colorado Life. Send images with photo descriptions and your contact information to photos@coloradolifemag. com or visit coloradolifemag.com/contribute.
THIS PHOTO was shot with a Canon 5DS R, exposed at ISO 100, f/11 for 1/800 of a second.
Hike, bike or ski to the 10th Mountain Huts for the panoramas, and stay for lessons about what made this country great
by PETER MOORE
up
IT WAS EARLY in March 2020.
Uh oh. Ignoring the viral news, my hiking buddies and I launched a winter trek to Uncle Bud’s Hut, a hiker’s hostel high above Leadville. We were planning to spend two nights at 11,000 feet, with six possibly infectious strangers, snoring in communal bunk rooms and sharing a snug living room and kitchen facilities. Bad idea, right?
Thank goodness we went anyway. I made those hut memories last for two years, as I waited to breathe safely again.
I had reason to believe that it would all work out, despite everything. I have hiked, skied, and snowshoed to a couple dozen 10th Mountain Division huts in Colorado over the last 20 years. I did so happily – OK, obsessively – even back when I had to fly in from Pennsylvania for the privilege.
Scattered in a rough oval that extends south from Vail to Aspen, these rustic
huts were built by World War II veterans upon their return from Europe. In the early 1940s, the U.S. military recruited skiers who could be trained as soldiers, to battle Germany in the Italian Alps. Camp Hale was base for 14,000 men who volunteered and mustered in for training. That’s the lovely high mountain valley on Route 24 between Leadville and Vail that President Biden designated a national monument in 2022.
During WW II, 5,000 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division were either killed or wounded. Many of the survivors returned to Colorado, where they developed Vail and Aspen resorts, among others, and invented the modern ski industry in the United States.
They also memorialized their fallen comrades by building and naming huts in their honor. Uncle Bud’s Hut, our destination “The Weekend Before the World Changed,” was named for Burdell S. Win-
ter, a 10th Mountain Division soldier who was killed in action in Italy in 1944. His family built the hut as a monument to their lost son and brother. Its walls carry a poignant verse his father wrote in his honor, and there are archives that document 10th Mountain training and battles.
That’s the way it is when you spend nights at these huts: You go for views and the high-mountain hospitality, but along the way you receive lessons from the sacrifices earlier generations made to protect purple mountains’ majesty, fruited plains and the American way.
It’s a beautiful combination of history and exhilaration.
I MADE MY first Colorado hut trip in February 1997, a few months after my father died. He was a World War II vet and my original trail guide, piloting my three brothers and me on trails all over New England. That’s where I learned the
joys of grunting uphill toward sweeping views and experiences. It was suffering with a purpose, and I gained valuable life lessons about perseverance, delayed gratification and the motivating properties of Hershey bars, as we made our way along mountain pathways.
A few decades later, those experiences would inspire me to fly west for the privilege of skiing to Jackal Hut, built by 10th-Mountain enthusiasts Jack Schuss and Al Zesiger. (Jack + Al … get it?)
My friends and I weren’t military material. We were out for a lark in the snow, and we found it. Our ski trail took us along the bottom of the Camp Hale valley, then cut sharply uphill onto the ridge where the hut looks out over a sublime landscape. We applied climbing skins onto our backcountry skis and humped 40-pound backpacks up toward the clouds.
The cabins are supplied with endless firewood to feed into raging-hot wood stoves,
and the kitchens contain all the pots, pans, and dishes you need to serve up high-calorie comfort meals. Accordingly, we packed in marinating steaks and oceans of red wine, many packets of cocoa, plus other necessities (dry socks, half-and-half), to motivate each uphill slide of our skis. We had to conquer 2,500 feet of elevation in three miles, with nothing but our legs and our bellies to propel us.
So, I felt a huge thrill, and relief, when I spotted the chimney of Jackal Hut, sending a welcoming wreath of smoke up into the bluebird sky. The two-mile high panorama of the Sawatch Range made me gasp in all kinds of ways.
When we burst through the door of the hut, clomping in with our AT ski boots, we were immediately welcomed by friendly adventurers. We found bunks upstairs in a communal sleeping room with 180-degree views of high-altitude heaven and threw down our sleeping
bags. I took a much-deserved nap.
That night, after our steak dinner, my friends and I pulled on our jackets and headlamps and tromped through the snow up the hillock behind the hut. The sky was resplendent with stars, with the mad tail of the Comet Hale-Bopp streaking across the sky. I shed a frozen tear, thinking of my dad, who had made me into a lover of the mountains and an appreciator of starry nights.
Thanks for all that, Dad.
Those two frigid, friendly nights at Jackal Hut would settle my travel destiny for the next two decades. Despite my busy life as father to two kids, husband to one understanding wife, and my relentless responsibilities as a magazine editor, I made time every fall and winter to fly to Colorado to take another hut trip. Yes, these high-mountain treks are habit-forming.
The highlights were truly high, and even the lowlights contained life lessons.
HUT LESSON #1: Be careful who you follow. One of the hazards of skiing or snow-shoeing into a hut is: Tracks in the snow. Every idiot leaves them, whether he knows where he’s going or not. And yet, I have often followed those wandering tracks, because they imply a route that might not be obvious in five feet of snow.
One winter a friend and I were skiing into Sangree Froehlicher Hut, just north of Leadville, in a freshening snowstorm. We were so desperate for hot chocolate that our brains were not functioning properly. That’s the only way to explain how we followed a pair of ski tracks around a cirque at the base of Mount Zion, until they finally, alarmingly, mysteriously stopped. It was as if the skier had been beamed up by aliens.
We turned back, skied another mile, and found the juncture where the trail actually turned off, toward the hut. The life-lesson here couldn’t have been more obvious: Be careful who you follow, because they may have no better clue than you do, and quite possibly it will be worse.
HUT LESSON #2: Trails lead in two directions, and only one of them is right. I’ve visited Uncle Bud’s Hut three times in my life, so you’d think I’d get the hang of where it is, exactly.
Not so much.
On one of my family trips to Colorado, to show our7- and 9-year-old sons the big landscapes the way my dad had shown them to me, I booked a couple of nights at Uncle Bud’s Hut.
It was a reasonable six-mile hike from the trailhead at the end of Turquoise Lake along the Continental Divide trail. But that mileage depends on leaving the parking lot heading north. After too little map consulting, I led us south, and were a full mile into it when I realized we were heading for Durango, not Uncle Bud. So, our hike turned into eight miles, rather than six, and probably didn’t boost my family’s faith in me as a route-finder. But if you’re a kid, it’s important to realize that Dad doesn’t know everything.
HUT LESSON #3: Breakfast is a trap! When you’re heading into the mountains in February, there’s a lot to think about: Do we have enough warm clothes, enough gear to see us through an emergency night out in the snow, and is merlot the right choice to accompany a marinated skirt steak? Answering questions like that takes time in
the morning – time when you really should be on the trail, not eating a giant burrito.
But breakfast was our priority before a winter trip to Ben Eiseman Hut, on the ridge looking down Vail valley. Over our third cup of coffee, we debated our dinner plans and which gear to take or leave out, and hence arrived at the trailhead three hours late. Off we skied, full of optimism, but without proper knowledge of the route up to the hut.
At a critical trail juncture, we followed random tracks, instead of the actual trail, so we ended up on top of a little hill, where we ate lunch and contemplated our stupidity. (Are you sensing a theme, here?) We’d
left the hut route an hour earlier. Then we compounded the error by choosing to follow a contour line on the map, rather than return to the point of our wrong turn. Our reward for these miscalculations was a four-hour slog through deep snow. We finally rejoined the trail at dusk – it comes early, in winter! – and continued our uphill struggle well into the night. Around 10 p.m., I caught a whiff of woodsmoke and knew our ordeal was nearly over.
When we shed our skis and stumbled through the front door, our hut mates –all of whom had arrived, sensibly, that afternoon – looked up in alarm. I collapsed
onto a couch and was administered hot beverages by kind strangers.
Sometimes suffering is worth the sympathy it engenders.
HUT LESSON #4: Huts are almost heaven. There are plenty of reasons I feel that way. For one thing, they are about as high as heaven; it’s a challenge to hike, breathe and sleep at 10,000 feet.
But aside from those minuses, consider these countervailing pluses:
1. Huts have roofs and thick walls.
Once you’re in, you’re safe and warm, so you can recover from whatever it took to get you there.
2. Huts are stocked with plenty of split wood, and stoves to burn it in. My friend Greg likes to pack bread-making ingredients, to bake in the cast-iron ovens that are standard hut equipment. Heat is happiness.
3. Huts have propane burners to cook on, plus all the plates, silverware and cook pans you need to whip up culinary masterpieces. Or plain old mac n cheese. And
because you’re not carrying a tent, you have more room to pack food and drink. Those equate to happiness, too.
4. Location, location, location. 10th Mountain huts, situated at or above timberline in one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in the world, have all three.
5. They’re cheap. Less than $40 a night buys you a bunk, 12 new best friends and all-you-can-eat scenery. Try finding a bargain like that on Airbnb.
6. You’ll meet exceptional people (living and dead) up there. There’s an aristocracy
Fritz Hut (left) is one of two cabins built in 1990 in the Hunter-Frying Pan Wilderness, above Aspen, to honor Fritz and Fabi Benedict, who conceived of the hut system. Janet’s Cabin (above) is a so-called Summit Hut, near Copper Mountain Ski Resort, also built in 1990.
of altitude and attitude for people who will even consider walking uphill for six miles under a heavy burden to spend a night in the mountains. If you’re one of them, you’ll find like-minded nutcases once you enter any hut. And the people are as important to the joy of huts as any view. You’ll also be able to read about the efforts of the 10th Mountain soldiers, including the specific hero your hut is named for. I’ve made it my reverential duty to read up on, and thank, these soldiers with every visit.
HUT LESSON #5: When you’ve been skiing to the huts for two decades, flying in from out of state, you should consider relocating to Colorado. That was a version of the argument I made to my wife when our kids had left our Pennsylvania home and it was clear they wouldn’t be returning. “We could save money on airfare if we moved to Fort Collins, hon!” I argued. We did, in 2017. As my favorite bumper sticker says: I wasn’t born in Colorado, but I got here as soon as I could. And on some level, I had been laying
down a geographical down payment on this special place, each time I walked or skied the spectacular Rocky Mountain ridgelines and stayed in iconic huts with views of everything worth seeing.
I belong here now because I’ve lived the landscape.
HUT LESSON #6: If the stock market collapses when you’re visiting Uncle Bud, you won’t even notice. As noted above, I snowshoed into Uncle Bud’s Hut as the world was succumbing to a marauding virus. We were of course dimly aware of the threat. But once we left the trailhead, we were oblivious to the tick-tock of dire news. Happily, the huts have no Wi-Fi, and all the cell towers are pointed in other directions. Which brings to mind the zen koan: If the stock market crashes when you’re in the wilderness, does it make a sound?
I can confirm that it does not.
And besides, there are more important things to consider up there. The first-time nature called, when I was at Uncle Bud’s
Hut, I found my way along a frozen path to the outhouse, thinking that the privy had an oddly prominent location. When I stepped inside, I realized why it had been placed there: The south-facing window of the toilet perfectly framed Mount Elbert, Colorado’s highest peak. That privy offers one of my favorite mountain views in Colorado.
That’s the hut effect in a nutshell: These gorgeously situated cabins take everyday life to new heights. So, hop on huts.org and make a reservation. There are probably spots open next fall, after the kids go back to school. And the aspens will be spectacular. There are hike-ins from one to 10 miles, and even a few where you can drive your four-wheel drive right up to the door. I like to snowshoe in because winter is spectacular up there.
Whatever the season, just go. When you reach your hut, tip your hat to the mountain soldiers who made our current lives possible, and invited us to enjoy this landscape by building high mountain refuges that help you see Colorado from an elevated angle.
Alfred Packer was a cannibal, but was he also a murderer, as a Lake City jury found, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Opposite page, the view from near Slumgullion Pass.
This article was originally published in the March/April 2013 issue of Colorado Life.
by MATT MASICH
Government official Charles Adams summoned Alfred G. Packer to his office on the Los Piños Indian agency, determined to find out what really happened to Packer’s five traveling companions.
“I believe these men are dead and you know something about it,” Adams said. “You might as well tell the truth. If the matter is as I suspect, you are more to be pitied than blamed.”
Several minutes passed. Packer said nothing.
Three months earlier, in February 1874, the lanky, blue-eyed 31-year-old was one of six gold prospectors to venture into southwest Colorado’s San Juan Mountains during one of the worst winters in memory. They were headed for the Indian agency south of present-day Gunnison, but Packer was the only one who arrived. Though he claimed the rest of his party left him behind after his feet got too frozen to keep up, rumors soon spread that he had murdered his comrades for their money.
Perhaps feeling cornered by Adams’ interrogation, Packer finally broke his silence with a cryptic, disturbing observation: “It would not be the first time that people had been obliged to eat each other when they were hungry.”
And so, through tears, Packer began to confess. It was to be the first of many confessions. He would recount his story a number of times over the next three decades, with the details changing in each telling. To this day, no one knows if Packer was the blameless victim of blizzards and starvation, or a calculating murderer who led five men to their doom. But there is one detail that was the same in each confession: He survived more than a month in the frozen wilderness by eating human flesh. Alfred G. Packer was a cannibal.
Packer was born near Pittsburgh on Nov. 21, 1842, though he claimed his birthday was Jan. 21. This ambiguity is a hallmark of Packer’s life. There are two stories for even the most basic details, including his name. The spelling was Alfred in all official documents and contemporary newspapers, but he repeatedly signed his name “Alferd.” He left his parents, brother and two sisters at a young age, and by his late teens, he was living as a shoemaker in Minnesota.
All his life, Packer suffered from epilepsy, a disorder then thought to be linked to insanity. He enlisted with two different Union regiments during the Civil War, but he served with each for less than a year before getting discharged due to seizures, which occurred every two days, if not more frequently.
He spent the decade after the war drifting from job to job –hunter, hard-rock miner, trapper, teamster, guide – but despite his various explanations for his seizures, his employment invariably ended when his ailment manifested itself. By 1872, Packer arrived in Colorado. He worked as a miner in Georgetown, where he lost part of his left pinky and index finger to an errant sledgehammer blow. He wandered to Utah in 1873, making a poor living at the mines there. Then came word of a new gold strike in Colorado, and a group of would-be gold hunters – strangers to one another – gathered in Bingham Canyon, Utah, eager to get first crack at the untapped riches of the San Juans. Among them was Packer, who touted his experience traveling the mountains of Colorado.
Another man on the trip, Preston Nutter, summed up the general opinion of Packer: “He was sulky, obstinate and quarrelsome. He was a petty thief willing to take things that did not belong to him, whether of any value or not.” Whether Packer actually did
anything to warrant this assessment is unknown, but the stigma of his epilepsy might have contributed to the mistrust. He suffered “fits” while still in Utah. Once, while sitting by the campfire, he was overcome by a seizure and fell into the flames, overturning a coffeepot, which spattered its scalding contents on his face.
The party, which grew to include 21 men, set out in late autumn on a long journey by foot to the Colorado border. The travel was slow, game was scarce and early snow was heavy. Facing dwindling rations, the crew was forced to eat livestock feed. By late January 1874, the bedraggled lot made it to the Ute Indian camp of Chief Ouray in Colorado, near present-day Delta. Ouray shared his food and fire with the white men. He knew the country as well as anyone, and he warned his guests that to venture into the mountains at this time of year was to risk certain death – no Ute would attempt such a passage until spring.
But some of the party of 21 refused to wait for better weather. Seeing there was no stopping them, Ouray gave directions: Travel east for seven days to the government cattle camp near Gunnison, then follow the creek south to the Los Piños Indian Agency, from which it would be a relatively easy 40-mile trek to Saguache. Packer was the nominal guide for the group of six that departed Feb. 9. With him were George Noon, a teenager; Israel Swan, older than 60 and rumored to be carrying thousands in cash; James Humphrey; Frank Miller, a butcher from Germany; and stout, red-faced, red-haired Shannon Wilson Bell.
They were almost immediately lost. The relentless snow fell so deep they had to travel along the ridges, rather than the gulches they’d planned on following, Packer later testified. After nine days, they ate their final pint of flour, which he said they mixed with melted snow to make a sort of mush. A few days later, Noon offered his pair of goatskin moccasins to eat; they plucked out the hair, roasted and ate them. Every few days they’d eat another man’s moccasins until there were none left. They soon ran out of matches, so they marched with burning coals in a coffeepot, which old man Swan volunteered to carry to keep his hands warm – he was suffering the worst from the cold.
They forged ahead, an ever-growing blanket of snow making it impossible to retrace their steps. They ate rosebuds from wild rosebushes and chewed pine gum to allay their hunger, but it wasn’t working. They cried and shouted and prayed – in their desperate hunger, they prayed most of all for the taste of salt. Coming to a frozen lake, they punched a hole through the ice to catch some fish, but they found only muck. By day 20 of their supposed seven-day trip, the exhausted Swan could go no further. The famished, frozen men followed the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River to a pine-shaded gulch near a plateau – places now known as Dead Man’s Gulch and Cannibal Plateau.
On April 16, a well-fed Packer stumbled out of the woods and onto the Indian agency. He ran into Preston Nutter and other members of the original Utah party who had waited out the winter in Ouray’s camp; like Packer, they were just arriving at the agency, but unlike him they’d had a relatively easy 14-day trip.
Packer rode a stagecoach with some of them to the town of
“All agreed they were a nasty, bad-smelling mess to handle,” said a man who arrived at the scene.
As fate would have it, the bodies in Dead
were discovered by a traveling newspaper illustrator who recorded the scene for posterity.
Forensic expert Walter Birkbey measures a femur of one of Packer’s comrades (some would say victims) during the 1989 exhumation project. Pieces of skull (below) broke loose as a result of a hatchet attack; fabric fibers recovered from some of the skulls suggested the men’s heads were covered with blankets when they were attacked.
Saguache, and they naturally wondered what became of his companions. Packer claimed they had left him behind, forcing him to survive on rosebuds and small game on his solitary journey, but his Utah acquaintances grew suspicious once they reached Saguache. Packer was thought to be nearly penniless, so how did he get the money for a new horse and saddle when he hit town? And how could he afford his current drinking and card-playing spree in a local saloon?
Packer spent two weeks living it up in Saguache before Charles Adams, the man in charge of the Los Piños Indian Agency, talked him into returning to the agency to lead a search party for the missing men. Adams asked Packer where he’d gotten his money, and Packer said he borrowed it from a local blacksmith. Adams soon discovered that was a lie and urged Packer to come clean, prompting his first – and least truthful – confession. It was late in the evening of May 4 that Packer began spinning his tale.
They were lost, Packer told Adams, and old man Swan died of hunger. The party cut meat from his body and traveled on for a few more days until the death of Humphrey, who also was eaten. Days later, Packer went off to gather firewood, returning to find Miller had been killed by the two remaining men. Bell later killed Noon, and later still he tried to club Packer with his rifle but
missed, breaking it against a tree. Packer shot and killed Bell, took a large hunk of his body for food and kept hiking.
Adams was inclined to believe Packer’s story and authorized a search for the bodies. Packer was the guide, and Nutter and other members of the Utah group followed, but after a few days of looking, Packer claimed he couldn’t find the route he’d traveled. “You killed these men and you ought to be hung for it,” an enraged Nutter said to Packer.
Packer was arrested and kept under constant guard in a building on the Saguache County sheriff’s ranch. But months passed, and with no bodies found, no evidence of a crime and no specific charges against Packer, the Saguache County authorities weren’t thrilled about his indefinite detention at taxpayer expense. Someone slipped Packer a penknife to open the locks on his shackles, and the cannibal disappeared into the night.
It wasn’t long after Packer’s escape that a traveling illustrator for Harper’s Weekly discovered a grisly scene on the banks of the Lake Fork of the Gunnison, near present-day Lake City. Five dead and butchered men lay on the ground, each with his head bashed in by a hatchet – except for one man who had no head at all. The artist sketched the corpses, which had apparently been there for months, before alerting authorities. “All agreed they were a nasty, bad-smelling mess to handle,” said a man who
arrived at the scene. Nutter was summoned to confirm what everyone suspected: Here, at last, were Packer’s companions. But where was Packer?
Jean “Frenchy” Cabazon was one of the party of 21 from Utah who wisely stayed in Ouray’s camp for the winter. Nine years later, in 1883, he was working as a peddler in the mining camps of Wyoming. One day, he met a familiar-looking miner calling himself John Schwartze who wanted to buy supplies. Cabazon had to stifle his surprise when he realized he knew this man with long chestnut hair and a high, grating voice, but he wasn’t called Schwartze when they first met – he was called Packer.
Cabazon alerted the local sheriff, and Packer was arrested. Charles Adams, by then a postal inspector in Manitou Springs, was called to Cheyenne to confirm Packer’s identity and accompany him by train to Denver, where a thousand curious onlookers gathered on March 16, 1883, for the cannibal’s arrival. Packer, looking haggard in brown overalls and a soiled woolen shirt, was glad to see Adams again. He had drifted to Arizona, Montana and Oregon before coming to Wyoming, he said, and he felt fate had drawn him to Adams so he could finally tell the whole truth. That night, Packer gave Adams his second confession.
The other five men hadn’t gradually died along the way, Packer admitted. They all made it to Dead Man’s Gulch, where the others set up camp while Packer climbed the mountain to get a better vantage of which way to go. Packer took a gun with him in case he saw any animals to shoot for food. He was gone most of the day, and when he returned, he saw his comrades lying in their blankets, except for Bell, who was sitting by the campfire. When Bell noticed he was back, he charged at Packer, wielding a hatchet. “I shot him sideways through the belly,” Packer said. “He fell on his face, the hatchet fell forward. I grabbed it and hit him in the top of his head.” The other men didn’t stir. Bell had hacked them all to death. Packer saw that Bell had been roasting a piece of meat cut from the leg of Miller, the German butcher.
Packer camped there that night and set out the next day, but snow forced him back. He made a shelter of pine boughs not far from the dead men, then fetched the meat Bell had cut off. He searched the bodies, taking $70 he found – far less than the thousands he was suspected of taking. Packer made a fire at his new camp, cooked the hunk of Miller’s leg and ate it. He was sickened by it, so he only ate a bit at a time. “I tried to get away every day but could not, so I lived off the flesh of these men, the bigger part of the 60 days I was out.” If this was true, Adams asked, why hadn’t Packer told him so nine years ago? “I was
The Packer massacre site is near Lake San Cristobal. The incident provided several morbid placenames nearby: Dead Man’s Gulch and Cannibal Plateau. Packer camped near here for a month, living off the flesh of his companions and waiting for the snow to melt enough for his escape.
excited, I wanted to say something,” Packer said, “and the story, as I told it, came first to my mind!”
The Denver newspapers had a field day with the story. Articles about Packer, described as “the man-eating murderer with his villainous and ugly face,” carried headlines like “Human Jerked Beef” and “A Fiend Who Became Very Corpulent.”
In the decade since Packer’s ordeal, the mining town of Lake City had sprouted up a few miles from Dead Man’s Gulch, and Packer was transported there for trial. On April 9, a heavily manacled Packer was led into a courtroom with a potbellied stove, chandelier and a “No Spitting” sign. Prosecutors argued Packer had deliberately led his companions into the wilderness so he could murder them and take their money; even before the trial started, that was exactly what most of the jurors believed had happened.
Packer defended himself with a rambling, at times incoherent statement. He freely admitted killing Bell, but only after Bell had killed the rest out of insane hunger. The jury didn’t believe him. Packer was convicted of premeditated murder, and in a long, eloquent statement, Judge Melville Gerry sentenced him to death by hanging. “Close up your ears to the blandishments of hope,” Gerry intoned. “Listen not to its flattering promises of life; but prepare for the dread certainty of death.”
Saloonkeeper Larry Dolan, who had been watching in the gallery and rushed back to his bar after the sentencing, came up with a cheeky alternate version of Gerry’s speech that is often repeated as the actual sentence: “There were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, but you, you voracious, man-eating son-ofa-bitch, you ate five of them. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you’re dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democratic population of the state.”
Packer was taken back to the Lake City jail. While awaiting his fate, a miner, arrested for drunkenness, balked at his infamous cellmate. “Packer the man-eater is in that cell and I’m damned if
I’m going to stay here,” the miner protested. Packer, his sense of humor intact, warned him, “Dry up out there, God damn you, or I’ll chew you up.” The petrified drunk didn’t say another word.
Packer was spared the noose. His lawyer discovered that the murder statute on the books in 1874 had been repealed and replaced without a “savings clause,” a technicality that meant Packer couldn’t be prosecuted for murder. The technicality didn’t get him off the hook for manslaughter, however, so he was retried in Gunnison and convicted of the lesser crime and sentenced to 40 years in prison – the maximum eight years for each dead man. Packer expected this, but made a curious request of the judge: He wanted to be sentenced 40 years, but only for the death of Bell, the one man he admitted killing. The request was denied.
Packer Party
Packer Solo
Intended Route
Packer considered himself dead to the world in 1886 as he began serving his sentence at the penitentiary in Cañon City, but he never stopped seeking exoneration. His efforts were reported by the newspapers, attracting the notice of Duane Hatch, a young Denver barber. As a teenager, Hatch sought his fortune in Wyoming, where he was befriended by a stranger who invited him to share his camp and work with him on a cattle ranch. He recognized the cannibal in the newspaper as his friend and benefactor. Hatch visited Packer in prison, where they resumed their friendship. He found Packer nothing
like the vicious killer he’d been portrayed to be. He was a model prisoner, who spent his time gardening and braiding horsehair into watch fobs and belts to sell to visitors. Packer, using funds from this venture and his Civil War veteran’s pension, gave money to paroled prisoners so they could buy respectable clothes and pay for a month’s rent while seeking work, and he never expected repayment. “Packer is the soul of generosity, and apparently cares nothing for money,” the prison warden said of him – strange for a man convicted of killing five men for their money.
Hatch spent the next decade seeking a pardon for Packer, hiring some of the best lawyers in Denver. When customers came in for a shave and haircut, Hatch asked them to sign a petition supporting Packer’s release. Eventually, the public came to believe Packer was indeed a victim of circumstance convicted on flimsy circumstantial evidence. Enterprising Denver Post reporter Polly Pry took up the banner, and by the dawn of the 20th century, most of Denver’s civic and business leaders joined her in pestering Gov. Charles Thomas to pardon the state’s most notorious inmate. The pressure worked: Before Thomas left office in January 1901, his last official act was to parole – but not pardon – Packer.
The cannibal and the governor reached a gentlemen’s agreement that Packer wouldn’t seek to profit from his notoriety. Packer got a job as a security guard at The Denver Post, but spent most of his remaining years prospecting in the foothills southwest of Denver. He died in obscurity on April 24, 1907, still longing to clear his name.
PACKER’S STORY took on new life after his death in 1907. Republicans in the 1930s founded the Packer Club of Colorado, a playful nod to Packer’s supposed eating of five Democrats. Students at the University of Colorado in Boulder eat at the Alferd Packer Restaurant & Grill, dedicated in 1968. And before Trey Parker created South Park, he produced the cult-classic film Cannibal! The Musical, in which he played a singing Alfred Packer.
Forensic experts still investigate the case – and come to conflicting conclusions. In 1989, a team led by law professor James Starrs exhumed the skeletons of Packer’s comrades buried at Dead Man’s Gulch. Analysis of the bones showed defensive cut wounds, as well as knife marks indicating defleshing. Starrs came away believing Packer was indeed the murderer.
More recently, David Bailey, curator at Grand Junction’s Museum of Western Colorado, tracked down a Colt revolver found at the Packer site with three of its five chambers still loaded. Using an electron microscope, Bailey’s team compared samples from the lead in the pistol’s bullets and lead from soil beneath Bell’s exhumed body. The samples matched, supporting Packer’s claim that he shot Bell.
by TOM HESS
After the silver market collapsed, three Colorado mining towns followed different paths. Some prospered, and some perished.
The calm of most Colorado mountain towns allows you to hear the coyote’s howl, the elk’s bugle, the red-tailed hawk’s screech. What you can only imagine hearing today is the sound of 1893 – the jackhammer sound of silver ore crushers that drowned out bird song and human conversation and rocked the Roaring Fork Valley and other centers of Colorado silver mining.
Silver mining was noisy and risky leading up to 1893, the price of silver rising and falling over the previous decades, requiring silver prospectors and mine operators and processors to wield their accounting pencils under lamplight as skillfully as their picks and drills in the darkness underground. If their numbers didn’t add up just right, the miners moved on, leaving behind empty holes and homes.
No matter how sharp their pencils were, no one in silver could figure their way out of economic pressures in August 1893. Political decisions made by governments a world away silenced the silver ore crushers in Roaring Fork. The price for silver fell so far and so fast that mining and processing became futile overnight. Miners’ families fled Colorado silver camps and
towns, leaving more than a dozen sites abandoned, the bleached and faltering timber of their homes attracting future generations of the curious, and those who mourn a lost way of life.
The fate of three silver towns – Aspen, Leadville and Teller City – shows that there was no easy path upward from the depth of a silver-lined disaster.
Today’s visitor to this leafy paradise of just under 7,000 pays $4,000 a night for the Presidential Suite at the Hotel Jerome. America’s love of Aspen’s downhill sking – it receives 1.42 million skier visits each year – puts a premium on lodging, and housing. The median single-family home price in Aspen is $14.55 million. Aspen is walkable, with a C-shaped pedestrian mall along three sides of a city block for shopping and dining. These are among the many reasons why a newcomer would not recognize what Aspen looked and sounded like in the 1890s. That’s when 40 rock crushers shook the Earth 92 times a minute, 24 hours a day, creating a ceaseless, chest-pounding roar equal to the decibel level of a Boeing 747.
The first silver prospectors arrived in Aspen in 1879 after a survey found the Roaring Fork Valley promising. B. Clark Wheeler, a silver opportunist, surveyed the town site, gave it the name Aspen, and founded The Aspen Times.
Aspen’s silver ore processing plant began operating in 1891 – so great an edifice that it required 1.5 million bricks delivered via two railroads that first reached Aspen in 1887. The ore crushers ground into sand up to 125 tons of low-grade ore a day.
In all, Aspen produced 101 million troy ounces of silver. The troy ounce is the measure used for precious metals.One troy ounce equals just over 1 ounce, which is about 10 percent heavier.
ATown leaders looked to the smoke rising from the plant’s 165-foot-high smokestack, the highest in the state at that time, as money in the bank. Aspen produced one-sixth of America’s silver, and with its silver wealth grew in population to 12,000-15,000, third in Colorado, after only Denver and mining rival Leadville.
Aspen became so beholden to silver, the only metal it produced in quantity, that it commissioned an 18-foot-tall statue, the silver-painted Silver Queen statue, in hopes that the statue would persuade Washington, D.C., lawmakers to continue subsidizing the price of silver.
The ore crushers would be silenced after just 18 months.
On Aug. 7, 1893, the U.S. government repealed its subsidy of silver, relying solely on gold for securing its currency. The final blow came when the British Empire asked its most populous colony, India – its 1890s population around 230 million – to stop using silver in manufacturing its one-rupee coin.
It takes a little math to convert troy ounces into pounds or tons; 101 million troy ounces equals 6.9 million pounds, or 3,463 tons. That’s one-fourth as heavy as the Eiffel Tower.
Without silver’s return on investment, Aspen’s population fell to 700 by 1930. Locals scratched out a living at 8,000 feet, raising their own food. Those who couldn’t afford heat in winter moved into Hotel Jerome to stay warm.
The journey to prosperity began when Friedl Pfeifer, an Austrian-American veteran of the legendary 10th Mountain Division of America’s World War II fighting force in the Italian Alps, founded the Aspen Ski Corporation in 1946 along with Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke.
Aspen residents don’t hear much in town today: maybe a few airplanes circling overhead, the occasional siren of volunteer firefighters, a thunder storm, the car horns of drivers arriving from the Front Range.
Otherwise, it’s bird calls in the morning, coyote howls in the evening, and human conversation.
merica’s highest incorporated city hosts a third of Aspen’s population, about 2,600. It had the ironic misfortune of being rich in more than just silver, remaining a mining town for decades after silver prices plummeted.
Prospectors came to Leadville in the 1870s for gold and stayed for the silver they found in the black sand that clogged their sluice boxes. The town’s population reached 30,000, double Aspen’s. Silver enriched one of Colorado’s most colorful characters, Horace Tabor. The millionaire could boast that he built Leadville’s three-story Tabor Opera House on Harrison Avenue in just 100 days in 1879. So famous had Leadville become that Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, lectured on “Art Decoration” to a packed opera house.
Tabor famously lost everything after silver collapsed, selling off Denver properties and living his final years as a postmaster. His death in 1899 drew 10,000 people to a milelong funeral procession through Denver.
Leadville leaders tried creating a national attraction after silver’s slide. They built an Ice Palace, modeled after a successful one in Montreal and another in St. Paul, Minn. On Jan. 1, 1896, 2,500 people ar-
Teller City is one Colorado silver town with at least one structure still visible. Some others, alphabetically by county:
Boulder County: Caribou
Chaffee County: Winfield
Clear Creek County: Bakerville (site of first silver discovery in Colorado), Silver Creek
Custer County: Querida, Rosita
Grand County: Dutchtown, Lulu City
Hinsdale County: Capitol City
Mineral County: Spar City
Ouray County: Guston, Red Mountain
Pitkin County: Ashcroft
Saguache County: Bonanza
San Juan County: Ironton
Summit County: Saints John
Silver towns that survived the silver crash: Aspen
Breckenridge
Creede
Cripple Creek
Georgetown
Idaho Springs
Leadville
Silver Plume
Victor
rived to enter the palace – 450 feet long and 320 feet wide, with five-foot-thick walls of ice carved from ponds north of town, held together by two 90-foot towers on the north side and 60-foot towers on the south side. The palace didn’t last long; unusually warmth weather melted Leadville’s tourism dreams. The building was condemned in March. Today, Ice Palace Park is a playground and picnicking area near the site of the long-ago Ice Palace.
In all, Leadville produced 240 million troy ounces of silver, or 8,229 tons – more than double Aspen’s load.
When silver prices collapsed, Leadville wasn’t finished with mineral mining. Steel makers found that the molybdenum extracted from Leadville’s Climax Mine could harden steel. Jet engine manufacturers found the metal ideal for their uses. Demand for “moly” would rise and fall, and with the rise and fall of each use, Cli-
max Mine would close and reopen, close and reopen. It is operating today.
As with downhill skiing in Aspen decades earlier, recreation is drawing a new generation of recreationists to Leadville. Every February for the past 20 years, the Mineral Belt Trail, a 11.6-mile paved surface, 12 feet wide, has hosted the Leadville Loppet Nordic Ski Races.
Cyclists use the Mineral Belt Trail, too. Jordan Bennett, 30, savors Leadville’s short summers. She’s a trained archaeologist who always looks down in search of artifacts. In Leadville, that’s especially important, because artifacts from the mining era abound. She finds plenty of “fairly old stuff” – utensils, spoons, wheel fragments, porcelain plates, teacups, all of it rising to the surface after 140 years.
Bennett said she prefers Leadville’s grit over Aspen’s pricey polish and endorses a local bumper sticker, “Keep Leadville [expletive].” Let’s just say that younger Leadvillians prefer things the way they are. The nicest room (“King Suite”) in Leadville (Delaware Hotel) is $425 a night.
Fred Mark, a retired geologist, moved to Leadville in 2007. He said a younger generation is relocating to Leadville with no
history or interest in mining. Most view it negatively. The town offers less expensive housing for workers who commute to recreational jobs in Summit and Eagle counties.
Mark’s son snowshoes to the ridge of the Mosquito Range, Colorado’s highest, near State Highway 91. The Mosquito Range includes Mt. Lincoln, Colorado’s eighth tallest summit.
Nine 14ers are visible from Leadville, including two of Colorado’s highest – Elbert and Massive. What lowland recreationalist wouldn’t envy that?
Named for Colorado’s “Silver Republican,” U.S. Sen. Henry Teller (1830-1914), Teller City is one of Colorado’s silver ghost towns.
The longest-serving U.S. senator from Colorado (1876-1882; 1885-1909) didn’t want things to work out the way they did for Colorado’s silver miners.
Teller won election to the U.S. Senate from Colorado in 1876, its first year of statehood. After leaving to serve as Secretary of the Interior, Teller returned to
the Senate and got his fellow senators to approve a resolution in support of “bimetallism,” the word used to describe the policy of securing U.S. currency with both gold and silver.
The government passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, the act’s title explaining exactly what Teller wanted, but a provision of the law proved to be fatal to silver. It allowed silver mining companies to be paid for their silver with gold certificates, which drained gold reserves. To stop its losses, the government repealed the act three years after its passage, but not without dire consequences in Colorado. Banks closed, unemployment rose, and real estate lost value. Families fled the state, crowding onto outbound trains.
Teller’s abandoned namesake town is in North Park, off Jackson County Road 21A west to Forest Road 740, which turns north to the Teller City site.
News of a silver strike on Jack Creek in what is now Roosevelt National Forest led prospectors to what became the Teller City site in 1879. A U.S. Post Office opened in 1880. The town grew quickly, gaining a doctor, drugstore, general store, blacksmith, sawmills, saloons and hundreds of homes. Two newspapers – The North Park Miner and Grand County Times – kept the town’s 1,200 residents informed. Visitors lodged at the two-story Yates House Hotel. It had Persian rugs and European paintings, a grand piano in the parlor and 40 rooms.
efforts that Colorado newspapers covered with breathless anticipation of a bonanza that never came.
Today, Teller City is dead quiet. All that remains is the Teller City Interpretive Site, managed by the U.S. Forest Service’s Parks Ranger District, based in Walden. A walking trail leads visitors past a graveyard of logs, as if flattened by a hurricane, with signage describing the structures those logs once formed and telling
snippets of Teller City life. Camping isn’t allowed at the site, but not far away is Aspen Campground, a first-come-firstserved, primitive site best suited for tent camping and small trailers.
Newspapers from the era quoted observers who spoke with silver tongues, a common expression for a clever huckster, claiming the Endomile Mine above Teller City was a “bonanza” like the famous Comstock Lode in Nevada. In fact, the Endomile never came close to producing enough silver to sustain operations, even after attempts to reopen it decades later,
The only silver mining in Colorado today is a byproduct of gold mining at the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine in Teller County, which is also named for Henry Teller.
The keeper of Teller City’s sketchy history is the staff at The Rand Store, an improbable standalone bookstore in Rand, pop: 4, along Colorado State Highway 125. Baker Teem, daughter of store founders Sandy and Don Teem, offers a typed and photocopied history of Teller City tales.
In the tale of the “One Hundred Foot
U.S. Sen. Henry Teller, an ardent advocate of silver and Colorado’s longest serving senator, could not save from ruin his namesake town, Teller City (left), a remote ghost town in Jackson County.
Swindle,” an eastern company had hired several Teller City men to dig a 100-foot hole. They dug 50 feet and struck water, dug another hole, again down to 50 feet, found more water, and between the two holes figured they had dug 100 feet, and called it good, billing the company, and leaving town. In another tale, Teller City had a champion horse, Sharp, which had defeated all comers. A mysterious challenger named Montgomery arrived, but the townspeople put their money on Sharp. He lost, but Sharp’s jockey left town with the prize money and a parlor girl.
Seems from their tales that leaving town might have been on the minds of Teller City folk. It was only a few years later that they all left anyway, some leaving hurriedly, dinner still on their tables. If Jack Creek and the Endomile Mine wouldn’t pay out, someplace else might. There was no one left to remake Teller City – no one to start a Nordic ski race, no downhill ski slopes. Just the sound of birds, the rustle of the wind in the forest, and flights of silver-lined imagination of couples dancing on the Yates Hotel’s Persian rug serenaded by the grand piano.
Snow makes new the landscapes outside our doors and within our imaginations, as these Colorado poets attest.
J. Craig Hill, Grand Junction
After the blizzard
The tracks of a ptarmigan
Etched in fresh powder
Robert Drummond, Montrose
Heaven must be happy today. Thousands of angels are descending everywhere; Landing on trees, the ground and buildings.
Their large white wings look so soft, As they fly downward in slow spirals. I see them land, but never hear a sound.
Their coat now brightens the dark. Everything has a new purity. Life is good when angels land.
Marina J. Ashworth, Denver
The year’s on track for its final depart cold is here, make a pot of clam chowder woes, joys and all between bow to majesty of virgin fresh powder
We worked our jobs, did life as we must smiled, cried and inside screamed louder The city, noise and tripe of such state Now bow to the charms of fresh powder
You whip on to your favored ski run Parking and lines now make you a groucher You smile when at the top of the hill Diamonds sparkle in all that fresh powder
You waited all year to stand at the peak Ken you are here, not home as a coucher You embrace grandeur as you push off Flying free on all that fresh powder
Ken Jarrell, Littleton
Streaming sunlight
Steaming mug
Front porch
Transformed vista
Fresh powder
Trackless blanket
Brilliant prisms
Stunning silence
Reverent heart
Adoring praise
Still voice …
Quiet soul …
Sudden commotion
Snow eruption
Rowdy squirrel Neighbor’s dog
Reverie shattered
Shovel awaits
Like snowflakes
All moments
End
Sandy Morgan, Colorado Springs
A lone figure shrouded in a heavy coat, blue wool toque, balaclava and sunglasses walks the road home.
No one would guess there’s a smiling old lady hiding deep inside her winter guise.
Dean Allen, Loveland
Once, the sky descended
A grey blanket stretched out like a shroud
No horizon in the distance
Clouds melting into mountains
A shared communion of snow
Once, ice crystals danced
All of Nature joined in Slender amber grasses gracefully reached up
Captured snowflakes held aloft
A silent supplication
Once, trees ached to fly
Young pines with 10,000 frost feathers
Tremulous white wings
Straining weakly against the intractable roots
A struggle for freedom
Once, dry dusty flowers transformed
A metamorphosis of plant and snow
The scent of autumn
The taste of winter
A juxtaposition of seasons
Once, the sky descended
The earth strained upward
Together
Cold and beautiful
Just for a moment
They were one.
Celeste Blundell-Camden, Englewood
Snowshoes on – then up, Passing white capped sentinels,
To … powder wonder!
Jo-Anne Rowley, Lafayette
Beneath a dusting
of sudden fresh falling snow
a squirrel shivers
Buffalo run through virgin powder, creating plumes of snow and tracks to the horizon.
Andrea Kessler, Peyton
Snow dusted peaks tower above Skeleton trees with shivering branches
Sunlight quivers on the crest
Where the cold wind dances
Shadows creep up the jagged edge
As nature slumbers in her rocky breast
A river far below sings a song of winter
But the mountain sings it best.
Robert Basinger, Rifle
That distant line on the horizon
Will be my destination
I’m working towards a goal
While honoring creation
The air is calm and still
The sky a steely gray
Here’s your weather forecast
More snow is on the way.
It was a long hot summer
Drier than a bone
I’m up here on the Mesa
So good to be back home
Laying down fresh tracks
Graceful, light and limber
Surrounded by birdsong
Deep in heavy timber.
The wind is picking up
The sky is laying down
Every tree I see
Wears a snowy crown
Feeling so alive
Stronger by the minute
When the storm arrives
I’ll be out there in it.
SEND YOUR POEMS on the theme “Mountain Tops” for the May/June issue, deadline April 1; “Taking Flight” for the July/August issue, deadline May 1; and “Bounty” for the September/October issue, deadline July 1. Send to poetry@ coloradolifemag.com or to the mailing address at the front of this magazine.
Recipes and photographs by
DANELLE McCOLLUM
MODERN AMERICAN FARE owes a debt to Italian cuisine, with pizza and pasta becoming ubiquitous fixtures on the dinner table. These recipes take some of those familiar flavors to create novel dishes sure to please the pickiest palates. The Three Cheese Stuffed Shells are a fun change of pace for pasta lovers tired of spaghetti; the Best Pasta Fagioli Soup combines pasta and beans in a hearty soup; and the Easy Skillet Pizza Dip gives all the flavors of a pizza minus the crust.
With a tomato-based broth, lean ground beef, ditalini pasta, beans and plenty of herbs and spices, this hearty, flavorful soup is the epitome of comfort food. If ditalini pasta can’t be found, other small pastas like elbow macaroni or tiny shell pasta can be substituted. The recipe makes a lot of soup, but it is great as leftovers and freezes well.
In large Dutch oven over medium heat, cook beef until no longer pink. Drain and set beef aside. In same pot, heat olive oil. Add onion, celery and garlic and cook until vegetables are tender, about 8 minutes.
Stir in beef broth, crushed tomatoes and tomato paste. Stir in Italian seasoning, and salt and pepper, to taste. Cover and simmer for about 1 hour.
Stir in cooked ground beef, along with pasta. Simmer until pasta is tender, about 10 minutes. Add beans and cook until heated through. Serve hot topped with fresh parsley, Parmesan cheese and drizzle of olive oil.
3 lbs lean ground beef
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, diced
2 cups diced celer y
6-8 cloves garlic, minced
12 cups beef broth
1 28 oz can crushed tomatoes
1 6 oz can tomato paste
2 Tbsp Italian seasoning
Salt and pepper, to taste
2 cups uncooked ditalini or other small pasta
2 15 oz cans cannellini beans, drained
Chopped fresh parsley, for garnish
Parmesan cheese, for garnish
Ser ves 16-20
Seasoned tomato sauce is combined with two kinds of cheese and diced pepperoni, baked until golden and bubbly, then served with baguette slices or breadsticks. It’s essentially a crustless version of a pepperoni pizza – instead of baking the toppings on the crust, you dip the crust into the toppings. The recipe calls for diced pepperoni, but home cooks can just as readily chop up sliced pepperoni, or swap in any other favored pizza toppings.
Heat oven to 350°. Add tomato sauce, Italian seasoning and garlic to small, ovenproof skillet and stir to combine. Bring to simmer over medium-high heat. Reduce heat and dollop ricotta over sauce. Sprinkle mozzarella and pepperoni on top. Transfer skillet to oven and bake 10-15 minutes, or until cheese is melted. If desired, broil pizza dip for an additional 2-3 minutes until cheese is golden. Garnish with a drizzle of olive oil and sprigs of fresh basil. Serve with breadsticks, baguette slices, pita chips, etc.
What’s in Your Recipe Box?
We are interested in featuring your favorite family recipes. Send them (and memories inspired by your recipes) to editor@coloradolifemag.com.
2 15 oz cans tomato sauce
1 tsp Italian seasoning
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 cup diced mozzarella cheese
3/4 cup diced or chopped pepperoni
Olive oil, for garnish
Fresh basil, for garnish
Breadsticks or baguette slices
Ser ves 8
Jumbo pasta shells are stuffed with three cheeses and seasonings, then baked in your favorite marinara sauce. The addition of a bit of sour cream and some seasoned breadcrumbs gives a perfect consistency to the cheesy filling. Using a marinara sauce with meat can make an even heartier meal. The dish is a good way to serve a crowd and freezes well when prepared in advance.
Heat oven to 350°. Cook pasta according to package directions. Drain, then rinse with cold water to cool so you can handle pasta while stuffing. In large bowl, combine ricotta cheese, 1 cup mozzarella, Monterey jack cheese, sour cream, bread crumbs, oregano, basil, and salt and pepper to taste; mix well. Spray 9×13-inch baking dish with nonstick cooking spray and cover bottom of dish with thin layer of marinara sauce. Fill shells with cheese mixture and place in dish; cover with remaining sauce. Sprinkle remaining mozzarella cheese on top of sauce. Bake, covered, for about 30-40 minutes or until cheese is melted and sauce starts bubbling. Uncover and bake an additional 5-10 minutes.
1 16 oz package jumbo shell pasta
1 16 oz container ricotta cheese
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese, divided
1 cup shredded Monterey jack cheese
3 Tbsp sour cream
1/3 cup dried bread crumbs, seasoned
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
Salt and pepper to taste
2-3 cups marinara sauce
Ser ves 8
by LISA TRUESDALE
A grieving couple carries on a horse-loving daughter’s legacy
JOSHUA HARDIN
BATTERED, BRUISED AND emaciated from starvation, Decker needed help. The once-majestic horse, neglected by his owner, had been trapped in a fence for four days. He couldn’t cling to life much longer.
A passionate horse lover since age 3, Seneca Corey desperately wanted to save Decker. So she did what did what any fierce, determined teenager would do –she brought him home and begged her mother to let him stay.
That’s all it took for Dorothy Jimenez to realize her daughter’s love of horses was more than a passion; it was a true calling. Dorothy had recently purchased 38 acres near the Larimer County town of Livermore, about 45 minutes north of Fort Collins. They had plenty of room to add Decker to their existing small herd of horses that Seneca rode in competition. Before long, Decker was joined by four other neglected, severely frostbitten horses who had been destined for the auction block. Dorothy and Seneca’s home had quickly become a hospice for equines who could live out their remaining days in comfort, roaming the expansive pastures with full bellies, some of them for the first time in their lives.
As their herd grew, Dorothy and Seneca hatched a plan to create a nonprofit horse sanctuary, in order to raise the crucial funds needed to take care of the horses, and have the option of saving others in the future. It seemed that vision died with Seneca, who perished in a 2021 car accident. Through their intense grief and heartbreak, Dorothy and her husband, Jason, launched the sanctuary in Seneca’s honor in late 2021.
“After Seneca died, knowing that her horses needed me was the only thing that got me out of bed each morning,” Dorothy said through her tears. “Moving ahead with the sanctuary was our way of carrying on her legacy.”
IT’S NOTORIOUSLY WINDY on the high plains six miles from the Wyoming border, so “Wind Horse” seems an apt name for the sanctuary. Yet the name is a Buddhist allegory for the human soul. “Seneca’s soul and passion and purpose are everywhere I look,” Dorothy said. “To me, it’s the perfect name.”
Monte greets Jason Jimenez, husband to Dorothy and co-founder of the sanctuary. The animals consume 100 or more bales of hay per month. Opposite, Dorothy cares for the animals through her daily chores.
It’s the “nonprofit” part of Wind Horse that isn’t perfect, at least not yet. Despite the sanctuary’s nonprofit status, donations cover only about 10 percent of operating costs. A large donation from some friends in 2021 allowed Dorothy and Jason to build additional shelters and fence in 20 more acres. Yet the cost of 100 or more 70-pound bales of hay per month, plus special grain mash, and the constant vet and farrier bills is completely out of pocket and slows down the couple’s ambitions.
When asked if they can take more animals, Dorothy and Jason say “no” for now, until they have the funds to build more shelters and fence in more of their 38 acres. They’re committed to giving the animals they have the room to run, the highest-quality hay and grain, and access to some of the finest veterinarians in the world [at Colorado State University]. “It wouldn’t be fair to our herd for us to take on more until we’re ready,” Jason said.
WINTER HAS ARRIVED at the sanctuary, and the sunrise doesn’t bloom on the horizon as early as Dorothy would wish. So, each frigid morning, it’s pitch black as she trudges through the snow on the way to the barn. She easily navigates the sloppy, slippery 100 yards by heart, though, since
she has been making the trek for years.
After Dorothy cleans the stalls, she feeds all 13 animals their breakfast and administers any medications they may need. Old Bay, a former barrel-racing horse, is approaching 30, and dementia has set in. So, when he just stands there at mealtime, looking around in a daze, it’s his pal Beulah who moves closer to him, nudging him gently towards the food. Old Bay and Beulah have been living side by side since they were just a few years old, and they were welcomed into the sanctuary family when their previous owner died. Missing their teeth makes hay im-
possible to eat, so they get a special mash of grain and beet pulp.
Coaxing Pierre, Primo, Pasquel and Paco to mealtime is left up to Dorothy. The four wild donkeys were rescued from the Bureau of Land Management in 2022 in memory of the one-year anniversary of Seneca’s death in September, and they’re still learning to trust Dorothy and Jason as their humans. After more than a year, Pasquel, the shyest one, is finally coming close enough to accept treats.
“Now he seems to think I’m a walking Pez dispenser,” Dorothy said.
Each day at the sanctuary is a little dif-
ferent, yet there are comforting routines for Dorothy and for the nine horses and four donkeys. There’s no shortage of daily escapades, either. Although it took Decker more than a year to accept treats from Dorothy or Seneca, he’s now the clown of the group, with no qualms about knocking the hat off your head or chewing the gloves in your pocket. “He also likes to ‘help’ us when we’re watering the herd, by taking the hose out, every time,” Dorothy said. “Of course, he always ends up spraying us in the process.” Royal, one of the frostbitten horses, is now the one Dorothy calls the sweetest of the bunch, though Royal also knows
how to sneak around the side of the barn at feeding time and swipe extra treats when he thinks his humans and his fellow residents aren’t watching. And then there’s Peanut, a miniature horse who has somehow learned how to escape his pasture, and he always comes back covered in burrs. Dorothy suspects he does it just so she has to spend hours brushing him.
After Dorothy heads back inside for her day job as a mental-health therapist, counseling patients virtually, it’s Jason’s turn with the herd. His 10-hour (or longer) all-outdoors workday starts around 9 a.m., rain, shine or blizzard.
Though Jason had zero experience with horses before reconnecting with Dorothy in 2020 (they both grew up in Estes Park), he was an instant natural. His passion for saving these loving animals is fierce enough that he now devotes himself to them full-time. “If we hadn’t rescued them, they would have had to endure a grueling, four-day ride to a kill pen in Mexico, where they would have been eaten or made into dog food,” he said.
Before Jason begins his work each day, he must give a handsome horse named Baby some attention and kisses, otherwise Baby will block his path until he does. Then he goes about tending to the herd’s many needs, like brushing them, breaking up the ice in the frozen water troughs, exercising the animals that need help moving, clearing the pastures and moving hay. As sundown approaches, Dorothy joins him outside, and the mealtime and medication routines begin anew.
Horse lovers can call ahead to visit the sanctuary, but the experience might not be all they expect. As they approach the fence to offer a carrot, they’ll see that the animals aren’t trained for human visitation. Horses sense human emotion 10 times more intensely than dogs, Jason said, and it was humans who neglected them, so they’re hesitant.
Though most of the equines at Wind Horse Sanctuary are still skittish and unsure because of what happened in the past, there is a definite look of contentment in all 13 pairs of eyes, as though they instinctively know they’re being lovingly taken care of.
Their two human caregivers are just as content, it seems. Jason feels intense separation anxiety if he ever leaves the ranch; he’d rather be with the herd all day, every day.
As for Dorothy, she’s always happiest when she’s outside with the animals, even if it’s scooping poop. And naturally, being with them and tending to their needs always keeps her feeling close to Seneca.
“I’m so grateful I’ve had Seneca’s horses to help me through the pain of losing her,” she said. “I’m also grateful that I was able to rescue even more animals in her honor. They give me a true sense of peacefulness, and of purpose.”
Some describe the call of a sandhill crane as sounding prehistoric, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Multiply that sound by 20,000 – the number of birds that stop in southern Colorado on their way to Montana – and you begin to appreciate why attendance grows every year at the Monte Vista Crane Festival; the cranes’ collective call in hauntingly enchanting.
The festival offers morning crane tours March 8-10 beginning at 7 a.m., and evening tours March 8-9 beginning at 4 p.m. Meet at the west entrance of the Ski Hi Complex.
The complex is recently renovated, and hosts local arts and crafts shows.
Motorists can choose to drive to the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge, a 15-minute drive from Monte Vista.
The refuge, established in 1953 on Rio Grande County farmland, includes Arte-
sian wells, pumped wells and irrigation canals dating back to the first barley farms in the area. Refuge staff mow barley fields as eager cranes circle overhead, eager for the mower to move on so that they can land and feed. The barley will help fuel their trip north, beginning in April.
Other birds in view include hawks, eagles, prairie falcon, and songbirds. Mammals include mule deer, elk, and coyotes. mvcranefest.org/festival
Monte Vista Crane Festival
MARCH 8-10, MONTE VISTA
On the streets of Monte Vista, you can see 60 five-foot-tall steel cranes fabricated by a local firm and painted by local artists. They’re tied to lampposts, so they won’t be migrating anytime soon. These cranes have been a Monte Vista attraction since 2019.
One of the painted cranes is typically roosting outside The Sunflour Cafe & Bakery. Munch on delicious cinnamon rolls or biscuits and sausage gravy.
278 North Highway 285 (719) 852-6945
“Bag of Money” is a part of the “Cultural Currency” exhibition at the
There’s no more fitting way to explore the artistic uses of U.S. currency – paper and coin – than on a free day at the Loveland Museum Main Gallery. That will save you $7 per person.
“Cultural Currency: Contemporary Art from the Riemer Collection” presents through April 28 a variety of uses for $1 bills: hanging from a hamburger like lettuce; $1 bills sown into a jacket; and a $1 bill that lists the national debt, with Washington’s head under water. Pennies form a handheld drill and hand saw; $10,000 bundles of $100 bills fill a purse.
“Money is not money. It is what people want,” said collector Louise RothmanRiemer, who began collecting moneythemed art in 1995. Her show is touring the U.S. “It is power, security, the ability to do the things that they want, need, or would like to do.”
Use the $7 admission fee you’ll save to create your own artwork. Someone out there may someday want to buy it, and for more than $7.
MARCH 6, LOVELAND
The Loveland Chophouse
Couples say this 1930s-style upscale gem is a quiet place (no loud sports bar TVs) for surf – lump crab cake, lobster ravioli – and turf – cowboy cut ribeye and Tournedos Au Poivre: pepperencrusted tenderloin medallions with armagnac (brandy) sauce. 125 E 4th St., (970) 613-8287
Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch
This dude ranch on the other side of the 220-foot-high Devil’s Backbone hogback from Loveland offers dude ranch entertainment and a songbook with “Home on the Range,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to make up for having no TVs.
2939 N Co Rd 31D, (970) 667-3915
FEB. 29-MARCH 1-3, STEAMBOAT SPRINGS
Three days of music is preceded by a Mountain Top Dinner, at the summit of Steamboat Mountain, where a long table will be filled with local food and drink. winterwondergrass.com
MARCH 15-17, ESTES PARK
Bredo Morstoel, born in 1900, died in 1989 on a retreat in Norway and his family packed him in ice. He ended up in Colorado and remains immortal among the crowds that celebrate him through coffin races. (970) 577-4000, The Stanley Hotel frozendeadguydays.com
MARCH 15-17, DENVER
A Pow Wow is a Native American tradition that brings together many different tribes for dancing, singing, socializing, crafts, arts and food. (720) 865-2475, Denver Coliseum
MARCH 15-17, MONTROSE
Learn about new products and technologies in solar power, home automation, security, remodeling, and design. (303) 867-0808
MARCH 27, VAIL
Vail Valley kiddos and visiting families alike gather at the Dobson Ice Arena for instructor time on the ice. No prior registration required. (970) 479-2271
APRIL 6-7, DENVER
The longest running model train show west of the Mississippi began as a “Holiday Meet” Thanksgiving weekend in 1976, attracting 2,500 in the 1980s. With its adoption of a new vision and new location, it now draws 12,000 to the National Western Complex. The show still does all it can to attract children, allowing them to run trains and creating a play area for wooden trains. It offers railroad-themed storytelling time, facepainting and portraits of children as engineers. (303) 364-0274
APRIL 13-14, LONGMONT
Tartan celebrations began worldwide in celebration of an April day in 1320 when Scotland declared independence in a document that helped inspire the U.S. Declaration of Independence. When attending Colorado Tartan Day at the Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, expect all things Scottish and Irish: bagpipes, haggis, whisky, Scotch ale, kilts and tartans: the latter patterned, rectangular cloth with colors symbolic of Colorado – sky blue and pine green. coloradotartanday.com
APRIL 14, STEAMBOAT SPRINGS
Watch contestants dressed up in their wildest winter outfits – or if they’re especially brave or coldtolerant, a summer one – waterski across a frigid pond at the base of Steamboat Ski Resort near Gondola Square. Four judges score about 80 contestants on their costumes, air, style and crowd response. Winner of 2023’s costume contest wore only underpants. Pond Skim madness marks the end of the Steam ski season. Ski patrol serve as lifeguards. (800) 922-2722
Winter conditions offer chilly challenges for intrepid campers
DAN LEETH
My wife and I were in a quandary. We had sold our former residence in October, and construction on our new home would not be completed until May. We needed a place to live through the winter. Considering our options and finances, we decided to reserve a full-hookup site at a local RV park and camp in our travel trailer while we waited for our new home to be finished.
“It will be cheaper than booking a bungalow in Tahiti,” I assured my skeptical wife, “and it will provide us with a worthwhile learning experience.”
As one might guess, camping is not a popular pastime when snow blankets the Colorado high country. Exceptions are largely limited to late-season hunters, skiers on the cheap and Canadian snowbirds who got lost on their way to Arizona. While some private and a few state park campgrounds offer sites during snow season, most national forest and Bureau of Land Management facilities remain closed. When the days turn frigid, most of us Colorado campers either park our rigs for the winter or pack up the s’more fixings and drive south.
For those willing to endure the cold, winter camping in Colorado offers some pleasant attributes. There are no crowds to deal with, no mosquitoes to swat, and camp-robbing bears should be tucked in, hibernating. Winter flakes can transform landscapes into glistening wonderlands of white, and for us late sleepers, those blushing winter sunrises arrive at a more palatable hour.
Over the years my bride and I have endured some accidental brushes with camping in the cold. One autumn, we
As one might guess, camping is not a popular pastime when snow blankets the Colorado high country.
booked a week-long stay at a national park campground. With no electric hookup, we employed solar panels to keep our trailer battery charged. One night, temperatures plummeted, and flakes flew. We awoke to sunless skies and solar panels worthlessly cloaked in snow.
With the trailer furnace blasting all night, we had seriously diminished our battery reserves. Fortunately, we also carried a small, gasoline-powered generator. Although we had to listen to motor noise all day, it kept the battery charged. We remained toasty warm inside our little igloo on wheels.
Most recreational vehicles like ours come built for summer conditions with thin, outside walls and uninsulated floors. To keep the cold from coming up,
our winter RV park staff recommended enclosing the open area between the trailer and the ground with skirting.
Campers on the move can purchase custom-made fabric skirts designed for easy attachment and removal. For those of us going nowhere, a cheaper, do-ityourself option was to fabricate skirting from inch-thick sheets of polystyrene foam. I spent a fun day slicing the poly-panels with my wife’s favorite bread knife (don’t tell her), then attaching them with Gorilla tape. Temperatures in our new “crawl space” ran 10 degrees warmer than the outside readings.
Another winter camping concern was keeping the water running. In late April a few years ago, we booked a multi-day stay at a full hookup site in Mesa Verde National Park. To celebrate my wife’s
birthday, I made dinner reservations at the park’s Metate Room Restaurant followed by a night’s accommodation in Far View Lodge. The weather had been pleasant, so I didn’t worry about leaving the trailer unattended overnight.
Of course, a storm rolled in, and we awoke to frosted cliffs and temperatures well below freezing. With our unoccupied trailer connected to the site’s water spigot, I feared we’d find burst pipes. Although the outside hose spit out enough ice to make a dozen margaritas, thankfully everything inside remained intact.
For our winterlong sojourn in the RV park, we bought a freeze-proof, heated water hose. We still had to deal with glacier-worthy ice forming on trailer steps, water vapor condensing on inside walls and locating a spot in our tiny trailer for my wife to place a Christmas tree.
In spite of it all, I enjoyed the challenge of Colorado winter camping. My other half, however, was less enthralled. If I ever suggested overwintering in a trailer again, she threatened to book that bungalow in Tahiti.
Bristlecone pine fair better in cold Colorado winters than the author and his wife do in their travel trailer, which has not served them as well as a trip to Tahiti might have.
QUESTIONS ON PAGES 12-13
1 Top Chef 2 Echo Mountain 3 Continental Divide 4 Aspen’s Buttermilk Mountain
5 Bon Vivant
6 c. Powderhorn
7 b. Steel City
8 a. California
9 c. Mary Jane Mountain
10 a. U.S. Air Force
11 True
12 False (its highest point is 13,487 feet above sea level)
13 True
14 False (second sentence is made up)
15 False (it’s largest, but 0.008 percent of the state’s area)
TRIVIA PHOTOGRAPHS
Top left: Winter Dew Tour
Bottom: Aspen’s Buttermilk Mountain
Top right: Echo Mountain
Do you have a story that portrays Colorado life from a unique angle? Send us your entertaining and timeless stories or ideas about the history, food, travel, nature, adventure and wildlife from across the state.
Email editor@coloradolifemag.com
970-480-0148 coloradolifemag.com/contribute
Bird watchers are finding their perfect playground on the Pioneering Plains of northeast Colorado. The natural backdrop of Plains areas in Sterling and Logan County invites birders to journey off the beaten track in search of new encounters with a variety of species in an unspoiled environment.
story and photographs by JOSHUA HARDIN
The pre-dawn frost covering the crimson stone columns of Colorado National Monument melts quickly when the sun rises from behind Grand Mesa to the east. The sun warms both body and spirit while it begins as a sparkling sliver spreading the day’s first light upon the tips of the monument’s rock formations, then expands into an orange orb becoming ever yellower as it ascends and gradually illuminates the park’s maze of canyons below.
The Colorado National Monument exemplifies the region’s varied climate moods.
Though the monument is on Fruita’s doorstep and only about six miles from bustling downtown Grand Junction, a morning here is an illustration of peace and quiet. While visitors enjoy their coffee, desert bighorn sheep forage amongst the pungent juniper for their breakfast. Those lucky enough to spend a sunrise might also spy on other wildlife, like a rainbow-hued, collared lizard basking on a boulder or golden eagles gliding along the thermal air currents in the blue skies above.
The monument exemplifies the region’s varied climate moods. Outdoor enthusiasts can find temperatures cold enough for snow deep enough for skiing or warmer, sunnier places marked by scarlet sandstone and piney green colors.
Rim Rock Drive clings to canyon walls, a 23-mile drive that passes 19 stops overlooking deep chasms and uprising rock formations on the way to the 6,640-foothigh summit.
Rim Rock Drive owes a large part of its
construction to pioneering resident John Otto, a miner who wrote hundreds of letters describing the region’s wonders to Congress and other politicians. Otto’s persistence paid off in 1911 when President William Howard Taft declared a 20,000-acre swath of wildland a national monument.
Otto hand-built miles of trails to some of his favorite spots, some of which were incorporated into Rim Rock Drive and finished by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the mid-1900s. CCC workers used simple pickaxes to carve the rock and wheelbarrows to haul away the debris. In modern times, the National Park Service and volunteers expanded routes Otto had begun: Otto’s Hike, Devil’s Kitchen and Coke Ovens trails. Hikes of longer than five miles into the backcountry also include No Thoroughfare Canyon, Liberty Cap and Ute Canyon.
Photographers driving Rim Rock in the morning find within a few minutes many perspectives of the morning light. Hiking takes more time and preparation but offers the advantage of delving under the canyon rim for shelter from wind, and less-pictured upward-looking angles of the park’s spires, such as Independence Monument. That’s the formation where Otto climbed and planted an American flag to celebrate the area’s place in the national parks system.
John Otto’s zeal is admirable, but not uncommon. Spending even one morning amidst the stone spires and intricately carved canyons will plant seeds of inspiration that grow like a desert flower in the sunshine.
JOSH SHOT this photo at Monument Canyon View overlook with a Nikon D850 and Nikon 24-70mm lens at 62mm, exposed at f/11, 1/50, ISO 100
