Moe wanted to know whether you had to bring a skateboard to Saturday’s Fall Skate Fest. I told him he could bring an appreciation for people who know what they’re doing. That would leave both of us comfortably on the sidelines.

He liked the sound of the music and the food truck. Then he asked a better question.

“Who was Lawson?”

It’s easy to get used to a name on a park. You use it to give directions, arrange a meeting, tell somebody where the kids are. After a while, you can say it without ever wondering about the person.

This one is worth wondering about.

Barry Lawson was the first director of the Estes Valley Youth Center and helped bring the original skatepark to town. Estes Valley Voice’s account of the park’s history credits him with helping make that place possible.

Sherry F., whose children played in his soccer programs, remembers him always being at the games. No elaborate story. Just that he was there.

I like that memory. Ask a parent what they remember from the years of getting children to games, and you might expect a winning season or a particularly long ride home. Sometimes what stays is the adult you could count on seeing when you arrived.

“So there’s a soccer story in the skatepark?” Moe asked.

There is. Different equipment, same need for somebody to help make things happen. A ball and a board don’t look much alike, but neither one organizes a youth program.

Barry died in 2010. The park was dedicated to him in 2013. His name stayed with it, but the years weren’t especially kind to the old park.

And that left the town with a question a new sign couldn’t answer: what would it take to give the next group of kids a good place to ride?…

Why Are People Bugling in Bond Park?

The town put it on the program.

Moe asked whether I was entering the bugling contest at Elk Fest.

I told him I hadn't spent this many years making a fool of myself for free to start doing it on a schedule.

The Town of Estes Park lists a contest among the wildlife exhibits, music and storytelling for October 3 and 4. Admission is free. The elk weren't consulted about any of this.

Moe said that seemed fair. They don't consult us before starting.

There's something I like about a town willing to put that on an event page. You can learn about wildlife and listen to somebody attempt the noise in the same visit. One requires curiosity. The other requires a willingness to be recognized at the grocery store afterward.

Moe wanted to know how a person prepares.

I suggested starting with the part where you stand quietly and listen. He said that didn't sound competitive.

It isn't. That's why I thought we might be good at it.

What Is the Elk Trying to Say?

He's talking to other elk. You're overhearing it.

The rut is the elk's mating season. The National Park Service's explanation of bugling describes calls that announce a bull's presence, address cows in his group, or warn another bull away. One noise to our ears doesn't mean one message to theirs.

Moe asked if every bugle meant a fight.

No. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation describes bulls sizing one another up and displaying before a confrontation turns physical. A rival can back off. Locking antlers isn't the only possible ending.

That makes the listening more interesting. Watch the other animals, too. A call isn't happening in an empty room, and the elk beside the caller are part of what you're there to see.

Moe said he could usually tell what I meant from my tone.

He has mistaken a request for more coffee for the end of a conversation. I'm not hiring him to translate wildlife.

Then he asked the better question. How does an animal that big make a sound that high?

How Does an Animal That Big Hit That Note?....

Were There Ever No Elk in Estes Park?

For about thirty years there were none at all.

Moe and I sat on Elkhorn Avenue Tuesday evening and watched four cars stop dead for one bull who had decided the centerline was his. Somebody's kid hung out a back window with a phone. The bull didn't care.

Moe said the elk run this town in September.

They do now. They didn't in 1890. There were no elk left in the Estes Valley by then, and there hadn't been for a decade. People with rifles and wagons shot every one of them and sold the meat in Denver.

Moe said he'd heard that and never quite believed it.

Believe it. It's the best documented part of the whole story.

How Do You Kill Off Every Elk in a Valley?

With a wagon, a repeating rifle, and a buyer at the other end.

Abner Sprague, who settled Moraine Park and wrote about the early years, laid it out. "Our [elk] only lasted about three years," he wrote. "They came down from their high range just before Christmas, 1875, by the thousands and were met by hunters with repeating rifles and four horse teams; hauled to Denver for three or four cents per pound." A 2006 National Park Service report on the ecological role of elk in this park quotes that passage, and that's where I read it.

Three or four cents a pound. By the thousands.

Moe wanted to know how long it took.

Not long. Market hunting here ran out in the late 1870s, and it ran out for the reason you'd guess. The last elk anybody wrote down was killed in 1878.

How Many Elk Were in That Shipment?....

Who Started This, and Why?

Not a Scottish immigrant. A Chamber of Commerce guy.

His name was James Durward. In the 1970s he was president of the Estes Park Chamber of Commerce, and he had a problem that anybody running a shop or a motel in this town still understands. Summer packs the sidewalks. Then Labor Day hits and the valley goes quiet for a month before ski season picks it back up.

Durward happened to be a lifelong student of Scottish heritage. So he built an event around it. His obituary, printed in the Estes Park News after he died in May 2023, says it plainly: he created the festival "to provide commerce and community opportunities during the fall season."

Moe asked if that meant the bagpipes were basically a marketing plan.

That's exactly what they were. A good one, too. It's still running fifty years later.

Why a Highland Games in a Colorado Valley With No Scots in Sight?

There were more Scots in sight than you'd guess.

Durward didn't build this out of nothing. Griffith Evans, a Welshman, showed up in this valley in 1867 and opened what's usually called the area's first dude ranch, years before Estes Park was anything but a handful of cabins. He wasn't the only one. The trade magazine Celtic Life International notes that a good share of the valley's earliest settlers came out of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

Moe wanted to know if that meant the festival was really about ancestry.

No. That's the part worth being straight about. Durward's own reason, the one his obituary states, was economic, not sentimental. The Celtic roots already sitting in this valley's early history are a nice coincidence he could point to. They're not why he did it. He did it to sell hotel rooms in September.

How Do You Get From a Picnic to a Weekend With a Sword-Fighting TV Star?....

What Show Is Actually Happening in Bond Park This Weekend?

Not the one most people think.

The Estes Park Labor Day Arts & Crafts Show runs Saturday September 5 through Monday September 7 in Bond Park, organized by the Estes Valley Sunrise Rotary Club. Free admission, over 90 artists from as far as 17 states, live music both days, and proceeds going to local scholarships and nonprofit grants.

The Fine Arts Guild of the Rockies runs its own show too, also in Bond Park, also outdoors, also full of tents. But theirs is September 19 and 20, the second weekend after Labor Day, same as it's been for about fifty years.

Moe said that's not possible, he's called it the Fine Arts Guild show his whole life.

I told him that's fair, because I called it that too until Tuesday. Two different nonprofits, two different weekends, one very similar tent setup. Somewhere along the way the name got borrowed and never returned.

Why Does Everyone Believe It Always Rains on This Weekend?

Because it usually does, just not for the reason anybody thinks.

This isn't a curse on one show or one guild. It's timing. Labor Day weekend sits squarely inside Colorado's monsoon season, and any outdoor event running from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon during that stretch is playing the odds against exactly the hours when the sky tends to build.

Moe wanted to know what a Colorado monsoon even is, since he'd only ever heard the word on the news talking about India.

Different animal entirely. Ours doesn't mean weeks of steady rain. It means a shift in which direction the wind is hauling moisture from.

What Is the North American Monsoon, and Where Does the Moisture Come From?

A change in wind direction, not a change in season length.

Every summer, strong heating over the desert Southwest builds a dome of high pressure that shifts the prevailing winds. Instead of staying dry, they start pulling moisture north out of the eastern Pacific and the Gulf of California, sometimes the Gulf of Mexico too. That moisture rides up into Colorado's mountains and Front Range, and it doesn't fall as steady rain. It builds through the morning, stacks into thunderheads by early afternoon, and lets go sometime between 1 and 7 p.m.

Moe asked if that meant the mornings were safe.

Almost always. Sunny start, building clouds, storm chances by mid-afternoon. It's close to the most reliable pattern Colorado weather has, and it runs roughly July through September, which happens to be the exact same stretch when nearly every outdoor festival in this town is scheduled.

Why Does This Particular Weekend Get Blamed So Often? ...

Who Was Fred Payne Clatworthy?

Moe knew the name. Most people who've lived here long enough do. It's one of those names you see on a historical plaque around town and nod at without having any clue what the guy actually did.

I told him: for about forty years, Fred was who you bought your postcards from.

He ran a tiny shop down on Elkhorn Avenue, fourteen feet by twenty. The inventory list tells you everything you need to know about surviving in a mountain town in 1905. He sold fresh eggs, vegetables, cameras, film, leather goods, and candy. By 1906 he'd locked down one of the first Eastman Kodak agencies in the state. Then he put a soda fountain in next door, which was the first one this town had ever seen.

Moe said that's a bizarre mix of inventory.

I told him it's the exact list of what people actually needed, from a guy who was paying attention. Apparently the town liked the way he ran things, because they elected him mayor in 1918.

And the whole time he was selling eggs and soda, he was out in these valleys making some of the first color photographs anybody in the American West had ever laid eyes on.

What Did He See in 1898 That He Could Not Photograph?

Fred came out of Ohio on a bicycle in June of 1898. Moe asked how far a guy could possibly get on an 1890s bicycle.

Turns out, pretty far. He hit Denver by July 17 and logged about 6,000 miles over the next year. Rode that bike until he couldn't, switched to a burro to get through Arizona, hopped a steamship out of Portland, and finally caught a train back home.

He was hauling twenty pounds of gear. A money belt with $125 in it, a cook kit, a sleeping bag, some spare clothes, and a heavy camera with a wooden tripod and glass plates.

On July 19, riding into Colorado, he wrote in his diary about the columbine and the lilies and the wild forget-me-nots. Then he wrote a line I've been thinking about all week.

"The ground for miles was the most brilliant colored carpet I had ever seen."

Moe asked if he took a picture of it.

He couldn't. That's the punchline of the whole story. Color photography didn't exist yet. The guy was sitting on a bicycle in the middle of the best field of wildflowers in the West, holding a camera that could bring home absolutely none of it.

He got to sit with that for sixteen years.

How Hard Was It to Make a Color Photograph in 1914?

In the summer of 1914, a Denver amateur named Clark Blickensderfer showed Fred how the autochrome process worked. Moe made me stop and explain it twice, because it sounds like a massive pain in the ass.

You take a sheet of glass. You cover it in potato starch that's been dyed and ground finer than dust, roughly four million grains per square inch. You roll it flat, coat it with silver emulsion, put a yellow filter over the lens, and then you hold completely still. In full sun the shutter has to stay open for a full second. If a cloud gets in the way, you're standing there holding your breath for ten seconds or more.

Moe said a second doesn't sound that hard.

A second is a lifetime when you're on a granite ridge with a wooden tripod and the wind coming off the Continental Divide is trying to blow you into the next canyon.

But here's the part that gets me. The plate that came out of that camera was it. There's no negative. You couldn't walk back to the shop on Elkhorn and run off ten more copies. Whatever you carried down the trail was the only copy of that photograph in existence, and it was made of glass.

He did it anyway. He shot Moraine Park. He shot Sprague Lake with Hallett Peak standing behind it. He got Longs Peak right when the aspens were turning. He shot Flattop from right near his own front door.

Moe asked how many of those plates he broke on the way down.

Nobody wrote that down. My guess is he quit counting because it made him too mad.

What Happened at the Smithsonian in January 1917?....

Once we had the chairs out, Moe asked me whether I had ever been inside the white dome behind the high school.

I told him I had. Then I made him sit through the rest of it, which is what a man gets for asking me a question at four in the afternoon.

What Is the White Dome on Manford Avenue?

You have driven past it a hundred times. Up Manford, past the ball fields, sitting on the high school campus like somebody set it down and left. Most folks take it for a water tank and quit thinking about it.

It is a working observatory. There is a sixteen-inch telescope in there, on a mount worth more than my truck, standing on a pier of concrete and steel sunk separate from the floor so nobody's footsteps shake the picture.

Moe wanted to know who builds an observatory in a town this size.

That is the part worth the chair.

Why Does a Town of 6,000 Have an Observatory?

Mike and Carole Connolly lost their children Thomas and Christian in a traffic accident on July 2, 2005. Their daughter Michele Johnson lost her brother and her sister on the same day.

That is one sentence and it is the foundation's own wording, and it is all I am going to say about it. I do not know what the months after that sounded like in that house and I am not going to sit here and invent it for you.

What I know is what they did.

Mike had spent a working life as a thermal engineer, the kind of man whose job was keeping instruments from cooking or freezing on their way somewhere far off. He had spent a lot of nights outside with his kids and a telescope. That is a thing a certain kind of father does. And it is a thing a certain kind of kid remembers for good.

So the family decided their children's names were going to end up on a building where other people's kids could do the same thing.

Moe said that is a hell of a way to grieve.

I said it is a hell of a way to build a town.

How Do You Actually Get an Observatory Built?

On Saturday, Colorado turns a hundred and fifty years old. The paperwork went through on August 1, 1876, one hundred years and one month after the Declaration of Independence, which is how it picked up the nickname Centennial State.

Here's the part that doesn't make the birthday cards. In 1876, the year Colorado became a state, most of what you can see from downtown was being quietly assembled into the private hunting grounds of a man who lived four thousand miles from here.

His name was Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, the fourth Earl of Dunraven. He turned up in December of 1872 after hearing at a party in Denver that the hunting up this way was worth the ride. It was. He came back in 1873. He came back again in 1874. And somewhere in there the idea took hold that a man in his position shouldn't have to keep showing up as a guest.

He could just own it.

The trouble was the law. Dunraven was a British subject, and the Homestead Act was not written with British subjects in mind. He couldn't walk into a land office and claim so much as an acre.

So he had other people do it.

His agents went down into the Front Range towns and found men who, for a fee, would walk into the Denver land office and swear out a homestead claim on 160 acres they had no intention of ever living on. More than thirty-five men filed. Then those claims were sold on to Dunraven's outfit, the Estes Park Company, at something in the neighborhood of five dollars an acre.

The parcels weren't picked at random either. They were picked along the water. In dry country, whoever holds the creek holds everything the creek touches, and Dunraven's people understood that better than most. On paper the company held around 8,000 acres. In practice it controlled something closer to 15,000. Some of the newspapers at the time put the figure a good deal higher than that.

Nobody was fooled, and nobody was quiet about it. In August of 1874 the Larimer County Express called the whole business "one of the most barefaced land steals of this land-stealing age." The U.S. Attorney in Denver took it to a grand jury. The grand jury did nothing at all.

What Dunraven ran into instead was people. Not lawyers, at first. Just people who were already here and had no intention of leaving.

The most stubborn of them was a one-eyed trapper named James Nugent, who everybody called Rocky Mountain Jim. He lost the eye to a grizzly in July of 1869 and never much bothered to soften how he looked about it. The English traveler Isabella Bird met him in 1873 and wrote him down as a man of obvious genius with real courtesy toward women, and also as a desperate character prone to ugly fits, which is about as complete a description of anybody as you are likely to get in one sentence.

What mattered to Dunraven was where Jim's cabin sat. It was at the head of Muggins Gulch, right on the only decent way into the park. Whatever the English Company wanted to do with this valley, it had to get past that cabin first, and Jim had made it clear he was not inclined to let it.

On June 19, 1874, Jim was shot outside Griff Evans's ranch. Evans was a Welshman who had bought out the original Estes homestead, and he had thrown in with Dunraven early. Jim lingered with the wound for the better part of three months and died that September.

Why it happened:

Terry Belair, now Terry Belair-Hassig had graduated from Berthoud High School that spring. On the evening of July 31, 1976, she headed up the Big Thompson Canyon with her friend Connie for a work party, the kind of ordinary summer plan nobody double-checks the weather for. A thunderstorm had parked itself over the canyon and wasn't moving, and by the time they realized it, the choice was already narrowing.

As the storm intensified, the creek beside the road rose faster than either of them expected, and the car began taking on water. Belair's own words, looking back on it since: "If you open the door and the water's hitting the tires and it's still raining really really hard, don't stay in the car."  They got out, with the water still climbing behind them.

Partway up the canyon wall, they found a ledge wide enough to hold them and stopped climbing. They spent the rest of that night there, soaked through, listening to a flood tear through the canyon below in the dark, with no way of knowing yet how much of the canyon, or who in it, wouldn't be there in the morning.

There wasn't a way down until there was light to see by.

Morning came slow, but it came. A small helicopter found them first

Why Is the Big Thompson Running So Low This Summer?

It comes down to snow that never showed up. Colorado had one of its driest winters in years, and the state's governor activated Phase 2 of the drought response plan back in March 2026 over low snowpack and high temperatures. Below Lake Estes, the river is running and water is released out of Olympus Dam. It's clear, it's calm, and the fishing report calls it some of the best water of the summer. Stage 2 fire restrictions have been in place across Larimer County since late May and are extended through July 21. No campfires, no charcoal grills, no open flame.

What Actually Happened on July 31, 1976?

It wasn't a wet year either, and that's the part people forget. July 31, 1976 started as an ordinary summer evening, campers in the canyon, families driving back from the weekend, the river running its normal warm season flow. A thunderstorm stalled over the Big Thompson drainage and stayed there, dropping inches of rain onto steep rock that couldn't absorb it. In some stretches, the river went from a few feet deep to 15 to 19 feet in under an hour. More than 140 people died or went missing that night, hundreds more were injured, and the damage ran into tens of millions of dollars. It's still one of the deadliest natural disasters in Colorado history.

Has the Canyon Flooded the Highway Before?

More than once, as it turns out. Early 1900s floods tore at the old dirt road before crews finally paved a two lane U.S. 34 through the canyon in 1938. Then came 1976. Then, in September 2013, days of heavy rain sent another surge down the canyon, washing out sections of the highway again, damaging bridges, and forcing more than 100 people to be airlifted out. Lay the dates next to each other, early damage, 1938, 1976, 2013, and it stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a pattern.

What Does the 50-Year Mark Mean for a Town That Still Remembers?

What Happened in That Baseball Field on July 4, 1908?

Before it had a name, before it had a queen, before it had a parade theme or a professional stock contractor, the Rooftop Rodeo began with a man named Johnny Malmberg and some very bad horses.

The Estes Park Mountaineer ran a preview notice on June 25, 1908, advertising what it called a "genuine old fashioned Wild West exhibition" to be held at the Baseball Park, a quarter mile east of town. Bronco busting. Roping and branding. Steer riding. The notice promised "noted riders and horses" and mentioned that "some bad outlaw horses are being rounded up." The word "rodeo" was not in common American use yet. It would not catch on for another four years. They called it Frontier Day instead, borrowing the name from Cheyenne's famous celebration, which had been running since 1897.

The July 9 edition of The Mountaineer documented what happened next. The crowd was enormous. They came on horseback, on foot, in rigs, and in automobiles, the autos apparently numerous enough that the reporter compared the scene to a Sunday afternoon drive in Coney Island. The bronco busting was so good that the judges could not pick a winner. The Mountaineer recorded it plainly: "the horsemanship displayed in these contests could scarcely have been better, and in the face of the riding done by all contestants, the judges threw up their hands and refused to go on record as declaring any one man the winner."

There was also a clown. A man named A.G. Birch dressed in full costume, rode a burro wearing trousers of the national colors, and attempted to enter a wooden horse in the bronco busting contest. Almost no one recognized him. The Mountaineer noted that when word spread who he was, "there were repeated calls for his appearance, and he graciously responded."

How Did a Fourth of July Celebration Become a Real Rodeo?

The events in Estes Park grew and formalized in fits and starts over the next few decades, never quite settling into a single identity until the name gave it one.

By 1923, the Estes Park Trail was using the word "rodeo" for the first time in relation to local events, announcing a Wild West show at Stanley Field and noting that "Colorado Springs and other cities have been putting on rodeos for several years and Estes Park, not to be outdone, will break into the limelight this season." By 1924, the events had taken on a shape recognizable today: bareback riding, saddle bronc, bull riding, steer wrestling, tie-down roping.

The name "Rooftop Rodeo" didn't come until 1941, and it came from altitude, not architecture. Estes Park sits at 7,500 feet. The organizers billed it as the highest rodeo competition in America and chose the name to make that point. The first queen was selected that same year. Her name was Patty Moomaw, chosen by ballot from sixteen candidates at the Riverside Ballroom. Lana Turner had been named honorary queen by local cowboys earlier that spring when she visited for a Look magazine feature. Hollywood business kept her from attending. The parade went on without her.

What Makes This Year's Rodeo Different?

What Is the Flip-Flop Migration?

Every June, a specific kind of visitor shows up in Estes Park, and you can spot them before they open the car door.

It's the footwear that gives it away first. Flip-flops on a trail meant for real boots. A cotton hoodie packed for a mountain town that can drop twenty degrees between breakfast and lunch. A gas station soda the size of a fire extinguisher, treated like a legitimate hydration plan at 7,500 feet. Locals have watched the pattern long enough to know it isn't random. It's a season, and it starts almost exactly when school lets out.

How Long Has This Migration Actually Been Happening?

The flip-flops are new. The migration is not.

Long before rental SUVs and cell phone maps, people were making this same trip by train and wagon, at a fraction of the speed and considerably worse suspension. Joel Estes found this valley in 1859 on a hunting trip and decided it was worth living in, moving his family of thirteen children into the valley the following year. The winters wore him down fast. By 1866, he traded the entire claim for two oxen and left for good.

Estes didn't stay long, but the people who came after him kept arriving anyway, drawn by the same thing that pulls in the flip-flop crowd today. Downtown grew up around that traffic. Outfitters to get visitors into the hills. Cafes to feed them when they came back out. Cabins, then motels, then condos hugging the hillside, each one built by somebody who fell for the valley on a short trip and wanted a reason to make it longer.

How Many People Actually Come Through Here Now?

The numbers explain why the sidewalks feel different in June than they do in February.

Rocky Mountain National Park draws more than 3.3 million visitors in a typical recent year, and the overwhelming majority of them funnel through Estes Park to get there. The town's year-round population sits a little over 6,300 people. For a few months each summer, the valley hosts a daily crowd that outnumbers its own residents many times over, all moving through the same handful of downtown blocks to reach the same handful of entrance stations.

That math is exactly why the timed entry reservation system exists in the first place. The park tested several approaches to managing the crowding, and the results were clear enough that the Day Use Visitor Access Plan, was finalized in May 2024, making the reservation system permanent rather than a pilot program.

What Happens at the Entrance Station When Someone Forgot to Plan Ahead?

How sheep, a century of loneliness, a meal millions of soldiers never forgave, and a subsidy for goat hair connect the Colorado high country to a building full of alpacas on Rooftop Way this weekend

What Did the High Country Look Like Before the Hikers Got Here?

Before the tourists. Before the national park. Before Trail Ridge Road and the timed entry reservations.

The high meadows above what became Rocky Mountain National Park were working ground. Spanish colonists had brought churro sheep north into the Colorado mountains centuries before American settlement. By the time ranchers were pushing into the high country in the 1870s and 1880s, flocks were already moving up the mountain valleys every summer, following the same routes through the same meadows that hikers cross today with trekking poles.

Tens of thousands of sheep worked their way through the Colorado Rockies each summer, watched over by men who were alone in the high country for months at a stretch. Most of them were recent immigrants. Basque men from the Pyrenees. Greek herders who had come looking for work. Young men sent up into the mountains with a dog, a flock, and a season to get through. One of them was a French Basque man named Dominique Laxalt, who came to Nevada to work in the sheep business. His son Robert later wrote about his father's experience in a 1957 memoir called Sweet Promised Land, recalling that his father had been sent into the desert with a dog and three thousand sheep, and that in the first months he had cried himself to sleep at night. Dominique Laxalt was sixteen years old when he started. He was not unusual.

To pass the time on long lonely summer days in the high country, Basque sheepherders carved into aspen trees. These carvings are called arborglyphs. Names. Dates. Hometowns. The church from the village they had left. Messages meant for the next herder who would pass through the same camp the following summer. Arborglyphs can be found across the West, especially in aspen groves throughout Idaho, Nevada, California, and Colorado, places once home to Basque and Hispanic sheepherding communities. The most documented Colorado concentrations are in the San Juan Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo range in the southern part of the state. If you have hiked through an aspen grove anywhere in the Colorado Rockies and noticed markings on the pale bark, you may have been reading something a lonely man wrote a hundred years ago and left for the next person who came through.

The NPS administrative history confirms that livestock grazing was heavy throughout the Estes Valley before and after the park was established in 1915. When domestic flocks moved through the mountain valleys, they carried diseases the native bighorn had never encountered.. Scabies. Pneumonia. Pathogens that were invisible to the animals carrying them and lethal to the animals that had no immunity.

The bighorn population inside what became Rocky Mountain National Park fell to around 150 animals by the mid-twentieth century. One hundred and fifty. In country that should have supported thousands.

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 reorganized the federal grazing system, requiring operators to own land to qualify for permits. The era of the itinerant herder moving open-range flocks through the high country was finished. The national park had been established in 1915. Grazing was phased out. The sheep left.

The bighorn, slowly and painfully, started coming back. It took reintroduction programs in the 1970s and 1980s to accelerate the recovery. Today roughly 300 to 400 bighorn live in and around the park. If you have driven up Trail Ridge Road in the spring you may have seen them near Sheep Lakes in Horseshoe Park, coming down for the minerals in the water. The NPS manages that corridor specifically to support them. The signs asking you not to stop your car in the road are not decorative.

What Did a Soldier's Bad Dinner Do to an Entire Industry?

How Old Is This Idea?

Before the grocery store. Before the supermarket chain. Before the refrigerated truck and the centralized distribution center and the produce aisle that looks the same in Denver as it does in Dallas.

Before all of that, there was a person with something to sell, another person who needed it, and a place they both agreed to show up.

The first recorded open-air markets trace back more than 5,000 years to ancient Egypt, where people gathered along the Nile to trade wheat, fruit, vegetables, and the basic goods of daily life. The Romans had them. Every city in the ancient world had some version of them. They were not a trend. They were not a lifestyle choice. They were how people ate.

When European settlers arrived in America they brought the concept with them. Governor John Winthrop established a formal market in Boston in 1634. Hartford got one in 1643. New York City by 1686. Philadelphia in 1693. By the time the country was a century old, most American cities of any size had a municipal market at their center. It was infrastructure. As essential as a road or a well.

George Washington sold produce from his farm at Mount Vernon at the Old Town Farmers Market in Alexandria, Virginia. The man who commanded the Continental Army and presided over the Constitutional Convention loaded up vegetables and sent them to market. That happened.

The Lancaster Central Market in Pennsylvania has been operating continuously since 1730. It started on a 120-square-foot plot of land, about the footprint of a small bedroom, conveyed from a private estate for public use. It is still running today, nearly three centuries of uninterrupted commerce, and it received its charter from King George II personally, back when Pennsylvania was still a British colony.

Think about that. The oldest farmers market in America was there before the country was.

What Nearly Killed It?

Then came refrigeration.

Then came the interstate highway. Then came the supermarket, which could carry a thousand products from a hundred different places and keep them cold and stack them in neat rows under fluorescent lights year round.

The farmers market, by comparison, was inconvenient. Seasonal. Weather-dependent. Limited in selection. You could not get strawberries in January at a farmers market in Colorado. You could not get bananas at any point, ever, from anyone selling things they grew near Estes Park.

By the 1950s and 1960s, farmers markets across the United States had largely withered. The USDA counted fewer than 2,000 operating markets in the entire country as late as 1993. The thing that had fed American cities for 350 years had nearly disappeared in a single generation.

It took a pile of produce on a government lawn to start bringing it back.

What Happened in California?

What Was the First Road Into Rocky Mountain National Park?

The park existed before the road did. That is not how most people think about it. They picture Trail Ridge Road and assume it came with the place. It did not. Rocky Mountain National Park was established on January 26, 1915, and for the first five years of its existence, if you wanted to reach the high country you got on a horse or you walked.

The automobile was changing everything about how Americans traveled. The new park had no way to serve them.

Congress had authorized a road through the park back in 1913, two years before the park officially existed. Work started in September of that year, then World War I interrupted it in 1914. Construction resumed in 1918 and the road was dedicated on September 14, 1920. Nine and a half miles of one-way dirt. It nearly broke every car that tried to drive it.

Who Built It?

The first three miles were built by state prisoners. Not contract workers. Not a construction crew. Men serving state sentences, working with hand tools on the side of a mountain. Pickaxes. Shovels. Horses moving rock that the horses could move and men moving the rest. No mechanized equipment on that section. No shortcuts available at that elevation.

The rest of the road was built under Bureau of Public Roads supervision with contract labor, horse teams, and early mechanized equipment. The crews had a seasonal window of a few months each year. The high country above 11,000 feet does not negotiate on that point. They worked when the snow allowed and stopped when it did not.

The route they followed was not new. Native American hunters had moved through that valley for centuries in search of game. The path existed long before any automobile did. What changed in 1920 was that someone graded it, packed it, and told people to drive single file going uphill. Going uphill turned out to be the interesting part.

Why Did Early Drivers Go Up in Reverse?

The grades on Old Fall River Road reach sixteen percent. Go look that up if you want to understand what that means in practice. Modern highway design considers anything above six percent to be steep. Eight percent is significant. Interstate standards rarely allow more than five or six percent. Old Fall River Road, in places, is sixteen percent.

In 1920, the automobiles that drove it used gravity-fed fuel systems. The fuel tank sat above the carburetor. Fuel flowed downward into the engine by gravity. On a flat road or a gentle grade this worked fine. On a grade steep enough, the angle of the car interrupted the flow. The fuel did not reach the engine. The car stalled on the mountainside.

The solution was not a mechanical fix. There was no time for that. You put the car in reverse. In reverse, the geometry shifted. The tank fed the carburetor. The engine ran. You drove backward up the steepest pitches of the first automobile road in Rocky Mountain National Park, with the mountains in front of you and nothing but air and valley behind you, and the general understanding among everyone present that you did not look down.

This was not a workaround for unusual vehicles or inexperienced drivers. This was how it worked. Drivers knew before they started that certain sections required reverse. Families made the trip in reverse gear as a matter of routine. The mountain did not care which direction you were facing. It cared whether your fuel system was working.

Moe heard this story and said it explained a lot about early American tourism.

Why Did They Build Trail Ridge Road?

How Did the 10th Mountain Division Start?

It started with a ski patrol president and a letter to a general.

In the late 1930s, Charles Minot "Minnie" Dole, head of the National Ski Patrol, watched newsreels of Finnish soldiers on skis defeating a larger Soviet invasion force during the Winter War of 1939. He had a thought. He wrote to General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, proposing a division trained specifically for mountain and winter warfare.

Marshall was not initially interested. Dole kept writing.

Eventually Marshall said yes.

The recruiting process was unlike anything the Army had done before. Volunteers had to provide three letters of recommendation attesting to outstanding character and athletic ability. Joining felt more like applying to an exclusive club than enlisting. The National Ski Patrol became the only civilian recruiting agency in U.S. military history.

They needed a place to train. They needed mountains. They needed cold.

They built Camp Hale.

What Was Camp Hale?

In April 1942, construction began on a military installation in the Pando Valley near Leadville, Colorado, at an elevation of 9,238 feet. By November of that year it was done. The entire camp, 1,457 acres, built in seven months at a cost of $30 million.

At peak, approximately 14,000 to 15,000 soldiers trained there simultaneously.

The training was what you would expect from a division being prepared to fight in the Alps. Skiing from morning to night. Summer hikes of 25 miles with full packs. Rock climbing. Cold-weather survival. Mule teams and sled dogs for supply transport. Winter maneuvers called the "D-Series" conducted at temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero, with orders banning open fires for tactical realism.

Some soldiers skied from Camp Hale all the way to Aspen on their days off. Some of those soldiers would later build Aspen.

The altitude caused constant health problems. The coal-powered camp sat in a narrow valley that trapped its own pollution in toxic inversion layers. Soldiers coughed through the winter. They called it "Camp Hell."

They trained there anyway. For two years.

What Happened at Riva Ridge?

What Is That Red Car, Exactly?

It lifts off from a small station near 2nd Street and Riverside. No towers. No intermediate supports. One long stretch of cable — 2,630 feet of free span — running in a clean arc from downtown Estes Park up the side of Prospect Mountain, where the cabin docks at a station perched on a rocky knoll at 8,708 feet with a view of the whole valley and most of Rocky Mountain National Park laid out behind it.

The cabin is cherry red. It has been cherry red since 1955. It carries twelve passengers and hangs, at mid-span, roughly 200 feet above the trees. The cable hums. The town gets smaller. The mountains get bigger. The vertical rise is 1,060 feet. More than three million people have made that trip since the summer it opened.

It is the oldest aerial tramway in Colorado and widely regarded as the first scenic-only aerial tramway in the United States. Built not for skiing, not for industry, but simply to take people from a valley floor to a better view.

Who had the idea? The Engineer and the Cliff Robert Heron was a Colorado engineer when the U.S. Army came looking for people who understood how to move things on cables up steep terrain.

The year was 1943. The Army had a problem in the Italian Apennines. The 10th Mountain Division was fighting on slopes that supply trucks could not handle. They needed food, ammunition, and medical equipment hauled up. They needed wounded soldiers brought back down. The task was assigned to Heron's firm: design a portable tramway for use in Italy and Germany, something that could be rigged on near-vertical terrain in winter, in a war zone, under fire.

He built it. The 10th Mountain Division used portable cableways in the assault on Riva Ridge in February 1945, one of the most difficult mountain operations in American military history. Soldiers and supplies went up. Casualties came down. The cables held.

When the war ended, Heron went to Europe to study what the Swiss and Austrians had been doing with permanent passenger tramways. He saw the free-span design: no towers, no intermediate supports, just two terminal stations and a long arc of cable between them, tensioned by counterweights. Elegant. Conservative. Honest engineering.

He came home to Colorado and started Heron Engineering.

The Town With a Mountain and No Ski Area

The history of Estes Park gets told a certain way.

Joel Estes discovers the valley. Lord Dunraven tries to steal it. Enos Mills fights for the park. F.O. Stanley builds the hotel. The men are in the foreground. The names on the peaks and the roads and the hotels are mostly men's names. The story moves through them like water through a familiar channel.

But go back. Look at who was actually here. Look at who was doing the work that held things together, built things that lasted, saved things that would otherwise be gone.

The picture changes considerably.

Who Put Estes Park on the Map Before Anyone Else?

She arrived with a bad back and a doctor's note.

Isabella Bird, a British explorer in her forties, traveled alone in the American West in 1873 on the advice of her physician, who thought mountain air might help. She was not supposed to climb anything. She was supposed to rest.

She climbed Longs Peak.

Her guide was a one-eyed mountain man named Rocky Mountain Jim, who dragged her up the final pitch, as she wrote later, like a bale of goods, by sheer force of muscle. She went home to England. She wrote a book called A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. It sold seven editions. Her readers became the conservation-minded public that Enos Mills later turned into park supporters.

She never came back. She never knew what she started.

In 1892, at age 60, she became the first female Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She spent the rest of her life going places she was not supposed to go.

Who Built the First Guest Ranch and Named a Waterfall?

All winter, the numbers were bad.

Historically low snowpack. Some measurements calling it the worst on record for the season. Water managers doing math they did not want to do. River guides staring at flow projections and not saying much out loud.

Then May showed up.

Roughly two feet of heavy wet snow fell across Estes Park and the surrounding foothills over two days. Some spots measured even more. The biggest May storm this part of Colorado has seen since 2003. After one of the weakest snow seasons in memory, the kind that makes old-timers go quiet when you ask about it, the mountains finally got something worth talking about.

One storm does not fix a whole winter. But this one changes the math.

The water.

May snow is different from January powder. Different in a way that matters.

January snow in Colorado is dry and light. A foot of it might contain an inch of actual water. You can pick it up with your hands and it weighs almost nothing. It is beautiful and it is mostly air.

May snow is not that.

May snow is heavy. Dense. Wet enough to snap branches and collapse carports and make you understand why the elk do not seem concerned about it. A foot of May snow contains considerably more water per inch than anything that fell in January. It will melt faster because the sun is higher and the days are longer. That part is true. But what it leaves behind in the watershed, what soaks into the ground and feeds the rivers and works its way through the system into June, matters more than the speed at which it disappears. Two feet of wet May snow is not the same as two feet of powder. Right now, that is a very good thing.

The wildflowers.

They were ahead of schedule.

BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD

May starts tomorrow. The wildflowers are coming up on the south-facing slopes. The park reservations open tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. on Recreation.gov for anyone planning a visit between May 22 and June 30. Trail Ridge Road is still closed but the snowpack is thin enough that the crews might surprise us.

And Saturday, thousands of rubber ducks are going to race down the Big Thompson River through downtown Estes Park while several hundred people stand on the Riverwalk and cheer for a piece of yellow plastic they paid $25 to adopt.

This is the 38th year they have done it.

Moe stopped by Tuesday and asked how something like that gets started.

I told him the way most good things in this town get started. Four guys having coffee with a decent idea and nowhere particular to be.

SIT DOWN. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

The River Runs Yellow

How four men having coffee in 1989 accidentally built one of the most beloved traditions in Estes Park history

What Were Four Guys Doing Having Coffee in 1989?

Solving two problems at once, as it turned out.

Estes Park in 1989 had a gap nobody had figured out how to fill. There was no United Way. No organized way to collect and distribute money to the nonprofits and community groups that needed it. Local organizations were running their own fundraisers and competing for the same limited goodwill. The town also had a shoulder season problem. Early May was quiet in the way that quietly kills a merchant's bottom line before summer arrives and fixes everything.

Stan Pratt, Nick Kane, Mike McDonald, and Steve Nagl were sitting over coffee talking about both problems. Stan mentioned he had recently seen a duck race up in Oregon. It looked like fun. Good way to raise money. Good way to bring people to town in a slow month.

Mike looked up and said the thing everyone in the room already knew. Estes Park had a river running right through the center of town.

Nick said the race could start at his restaurant on the water.

Steve said his place downstream could be the finish line.

Nobody formed a subcommittee. Nobody hired a consultant. Nobody scheduled a follow-up meeting to assess the feasibility of the duck race concept relative to other charitable fundraising mechanisms in the mountain resort context.

They finished their coffee and started a duck race.

What Happened Next?

BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD

Yesterday was Earth Day. April is Earth Month. Moe stopped by and asked how I was celebrating.

I told him I was sitting on my porch looking at the same mountains that have been there for five million years and thinking about the people who made sure nobody could buy them.

He said that counted.

There is a version of Earth Day that involves hashtags and corporate emails about sustainability. That version does not particularly interest Buck. But there is another version. The one where a skinny fourteen-year-old named Enos Mills arrived alone in Estes Park in 1884, met John Muir five years later on a camping trip in California, and came home and spent the next twenty-six years making sure this valley stayed exactly what it was.

That version is worth ten minutes of your morning.

Bigfoot Days is also this weekend. Good luck on your search.

SIT DOWN. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

The Kid Who Saved the Park

How a teenage naturalist, a dying inventor, and a British adventurer made Rocky Mountain National Park happen before anyone called it Earth Day

Rocky Mountain National Park was not inevitable.

The people who built Estes Park, the federal income tax, and the eleven-month window that changed everything

BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD

Yesterday was April 15th.

You know what that means. The government sent you its annual reminder that it exists. Most of you filed on time. Some of you filed an extension and are currently pretending that is not a problem. All of you, at some point yesterday, had a thought about how much you handed over and what exactly it bought you.

Buck's answer to that question, for what it's worth, is Rocky Mountain National Park. But we will get to that.

The people who built this valley never had that conversation. Not once. Joel Estes arrived in 1859. Lord Dunraven arrived in 1872. Isabella Bird climbed Longs Peak in 1873. F.O. Stanley drove his steam car up the switchbacks in 1903. Squeaky Bob Wheeler opened his tent resort in 1907. Enos Mills spent twenty-six years lobbying for a national park.

• Not one filed a federal income tax return. The law did not exist.

The 16th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1913. The Revenue Act followed on October 3, 1913—when returns were first due. Rocky Mountain National Park was signed into law January 26, 1915.

• The park and the income tax arrived in the same eleven-month window of history.

Moe heard that and said it was the most interesting thing anyone had told him on a tax day.

I told him the story gets better from there.

SIT DOWN. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

Nobody Here Paid Taxes Until 1913

The people who built Estes Park, the federal income tax, and the eleven-month window that changed everything

How Did Joel Estes Leave?

Joel Estes arrived in the valley in 1859 on a hunting trip with his son Milton. He was the kind of man who moved west to get away from neighbors and found Colorado because Denver had already gotten too crowded for his taste.

He moved his family in permanently in 1860. Two log cabins near Fish Creek. His son Charles, born there in February 1865, was the first white child born in the valley. They ran cattle. They hunted. They supplied the mining camps in Denver with elk and whatever else the mountain provided.

Then the winters got to them. In the spring of 1866, the Estes family left for the warmer climate of New Mexico. Joel Estes never came back.

He sold out for a yoke of oxen. A Colorado newspaper ran the headline in December 1899: "SOLD ESTES PARK FOR A YOKE OF OXEN."

The valley that still carries his name was a place he could not wait to leave. He never paid federal income tax. He sold everything he had up here for two oxen and a fresh start somewhere warmer.

By any measure, he got out clean.

Who Tried to Steal the Whole Thing?

BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD

Moe Pass came by Wednesday evening and asked what I was writing this week. I told him I was writing about the thing nobody around here talks about out loud but everybody has a story about.

He sat down without being asked.

There are places up on these trails where the light goes wrong in the late afternoon. Where something moves at the edge of what you can see and by the time you turn your head it is already gone. Most people who have spent real time in these mountains have had a moment like that. Most of them do not file a report. Most of them do not tell anyone.

Some of them do.

Larimer County has eight filed reports with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. That is eight people who saw something, or found something, or heard something, and decided it was worth putting their name on a document. A doctor. A local property owner. A family hiking with binoculars. A camp guest at the YMCA. A woman alone on Storm Mountain who followed a sound she could not explain.

None of them were looking for this.

Bigfoot Days is coming to Estes Park on April 24-25. Before it gets here, it seemed like a reasonable time to go back through the record and see what this valley and its surrounding country actually has on file.

Moe put down his coffee and said he was going to need a refill for this one.

SIT DOWN. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

Eight Reports

What Larimer County's documented Bigfoot record actually says, and why it is more interesting than you might expect

What Is the BFRO and Why Does It Matter?

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization was founded in 1995 and maintains the largest database of reported Bigfoot sightings in North America. Every report is investigated, verified for credibility, and classified. A Class A report means a clear sighting under conditions that rule out misidentification. A Class B report means indirect evidence: sounds, prints, or something at the edge of visibility that could not be confirmed.

Larimer County, which includes Estes Park and the surrounding Roosevelt National Forest, has eight reports on file. What follows is what those reports actually say.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Moe Pass stopped by Tuesday morning with coffee and a look on his face that meant he had been thinking about something on the walk over.

He had been up to the Many Parks Curve overlook earlier that morning, as far as the road goes this time of year, and stood there looking at the tundra. What he saw up there did not make him feel better. Some measurements are calling it the lowest snowpack on record for this time of year. Trail Ridge is bare in places that are not supposed to be bare in March. That is not a weather inconvenience. That is a water supply problem for everyone downstream.

He came inside, set down his coffee, and asked if I had ever thought about what it actually took to build the road we all take for granted every summer.

I told him I had been thinking about it all week.

There is a gate up there right now, closed at Many Parks Curve. Plowing crews will work it when conditions allow and the road will open when it is ready. Given what little snow is up there, it may open earlier than most years. But most people driving it in June give the road itself about as much thought as they give the asphalt in a grocery store parking lot. They should think about it more.

Because the story of how that road got there is genuinely one of the better ones in the history of this valley.

It involves:

• A 73-year-old man who started his career on the Erie Canal
• Half a ton of explosives detonated at once
• Drills that froze solid in December
• A trail that was already there long before any surveyor arrived

Moe picked up his coffee and said, "Well let's hear it"

So here it is.

SIT DOWN. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

The Road That Shouldn't Exist

How a 73-year-old contractor, a Bureau of Public Roads engineer with a feel for the country, and a trail the Arapaho had been using for centuries became the highest paved road in North America

Why Did They Build It at All?

Before Trail Ridge Road, there was Fall River Road.

Fall River Road was the park's first high-country route, built between 1913 and 1920. It was:

• Narrow
• Steep (grades up to 16 percent, curves with 20-foot radii)
• Prone to snowslides

It got the job done the way a bad tool gets the job done: technically, but not well.

By the late 1920s the National Park Service wanted something better. Something that could handle real traffic, connect the east side of the park to the west reliably, and let visitors actually see what they had come to see instead of gripping the dashboard on a switchback.

The answer was a road over the top:

• 12,183 feet at its peak
• Eleven miles above treeline
• The highest continuous paved road in North America
•  

The reasons were practical:

Jobs. The Depression meant men needed work and the government needed projects. Trail Ridge Road was both.

Access. Scientists wanted to study the alpine tundra. Tourists wanted to see it. Before the road you walked in or you did not go.

Connection. The road would link Estes Park to Grand Lake without going around the entire park.

They started construction in September 1929. The full route to Grand Lake was not completed until 1938. But the first section, east side to Fall River Pass, opened on July 15, 1932.

The Estes Park Trail newspaper called the whole project the "Eighth Wonder of the Modern World" in 1931. It was not finished yet when they wrote that.

Who Was the Man Who Built It?

Moe Pass stopped by Tuesday morning while I was reading the paper and asked if I had been following the Frozen Dead Guy Days coverage. I told him I had written about it two weeks ago. He said he knew that. He wanted to know if I had thought about what it means that Grandpa Bredo is arguably the best-housed frozen dead person in the world.

I had not thought about it in exactly those terms.

But Moe is a ranger and he notices things other people walk past. So I put down the paper and thought about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian grandfather sitting in liquid nitrogen in a 1909 ice house at one of the most famous hotels in Colorado, is living, so to speak, considerably better than most of the other frozen dead people in the world.

Some of those other arrangements have been considerably less comfortable.

PULL UP A CHAIR. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

Who Started All This?

Before Grandpa Bredo, before the Tuff Shed, before any of this became a festival, there was Dr. James Hiram Bedford.

Bedford was a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. He died on January 12, 1967, in California, and became the first human being ever cryonically preserved. A small team of enthusiasts showed up roughly an hour after his death and did their best with the equipment they had, which was not much. The procedure was improvised. Nobody really knew what they were doing. They froze him anyway.

Bedford has been frozen ever since. He is the only person frozen before 1974 who remains preserved today.

His body spent the next two decades passing through several informal arrangements, including time in a garage in Topanga Canyon, before his son Norman finally transferred him to Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1987. In 1991, Alcor moved him into a new dewar, which is when the world got its first look at how he had held up after twenty-four years. The answer was: better than expected, all things considered.

Bedford has been at Alcor ever since. He is now 59 years into his arrangement. Nobody has a date set for the next check-in.

What About Ted Williams?

The most famous frozen dead person in America is not a Norwegian grandfather who liked fishing and hiking.

It is Ted Williams, widely considered the greatest hitter in baseball history. Williams died on July 5, 2002, at age 83. Two of his three children arranged to have his remains sent to Alcor in Scottsdale over the objections of his oldest daughter, who said his actual final wish had been cremation.

The family dispute played out publicly for years. Court filings. News conferences. Competing accounts of what Ted had actually wanted.

The only documentation anyone ever produced showing that Williams agreed to be frozen is a handwritten note, smudged and stained with grease, found in the trunk of his son's car.

Williams is now at Alcor in Scottsdale, in a building near an airport in an industrial park in Arizona. His son John Henry, who arranged the whole thing, later died and ended up at the same facility. Father and son are now in the same room in separate containers.

Williams' oldest daughter eventually agreed to let the arrangement stand. Her one condition was that the family not attempt to sell her father's DNA.

Nobody has built a museum around Ted Williams. Nobody throws him a festival. The city of Scottsdale has not organized a polar plunge in his honor. He is in a building near an airport. He is well cared for. But nobody is buying a ticket to visit.

So How Is Grandpa Bredo Doing?

Bredo Morstoel is in a 10-foot silver steel dewar filled with liquid nitrogen, inside a climate-controlled 1909 ice house, on the grounds of The Stanley Hotel, monitored remotely by scientists at Alcor in Scottsdale.

He has a museum built around him. He gets visitors every day. He has an exhibit explaining the science of cryonics. He has a Norwegian flag on the wall.

Every March, thousands of people come to Estes Park specifically to celebrate the fact that he exists.

He is not in a garage in Topanga Canyon. He is not in an industrial park near an airport. He is not the subject of a family dispute over a grease-stained note found in a car trunk.

He is in Estes Park. In a building that has been standing since before he was born. Forty feet from one of the most famous hotels in Colorado, a hotel that inspired one of the most famous horror novels ever written, in a town that throws the most unusual winter festival in the American West.

The man landed well.

Moe stood at the door Thursday morning and said, "By the standards of the field, Bredo is doing extremely well."

That is the most accurate thing anyone has said about any of this.

Moe Pass came by the other evening with coffee and a question. He had been reading trail signs up near the Mummy Range and wanted to know why the old maps called it something different. The Arapaho name, he said, had never come up in any of his ranger training. Nobody had told him about the White Owls.

I told him to sit down.

There is a version of this valley that most people walking its trails have never heard. Not the pioneer story. Not the hotel story. Not even the mining story. The one that came before all of those. The one where the names on every ridge and peak and high meadow are not labels but explanations. Where a mountain is not a mountain but a record of something that happened there, told in a language that was spoken here for centuries before anyone arrived with a surveying rod.

In 1914, two elderly Arapaho men came back to Estes Park for the first time since their childhood. They were brought by a woman from the Colorado Mountain Club who wanted the peaks named before the new national park was formalized. What those two men told her that summer is still sitting in the record, mostly unread.

Moe put down his coffee. "Why doesn't anyone talk about this?"

That is what I said.

PULL UP A CHAIR. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

The Names They Left on Everything

How the Arapaho mapped a sacred valley, and what two old men remembered in the summer of 1914

Who Were the Arapaho of Estes Park?

Before Joel Estes rode into the valley in 1859, before Lord Dunraven tried to buy it, before F.O. Stanley drove his steam car up the switchbacks, the people who knew this place best called it something else entirely.

In Arapaho, the Estes basin was known as "The Circle" — a reference to the shape of the valley and its central place in their world.

They were not casual visitors. The Northern Arapaho summered in what is now Rocky Mountain National Park at least through the 1850s. They hunted, camped, fought battles, and built a geography of meaning across the entire high country. Trails went by specific names. Peaks held specific stories. The land was not blank.

They were pushed out as settlers arrived. By the time the park was formally established in 1915, the Arapaho had been living on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming for decades. Their names for this place had not made it onto any official map.

That almost did not change.

What Brought Two Old Men Back to the Valley in 1914?

In the summer of 1914, a woman named Miss Harriett W. Vaille was under pressure. She chaired the Nomenclature Committee of the Colorado Mountain Club. The Chief Geographer of the U.S. Geological Survey was pushing her to produce names for the features of the proposed national park. She could have invented them. She did not.

Instead, she traveled to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and persuaded two elderly Arapaho men to make the journey back to a place they had not seen since childhood.

Their names were Gun Griswold, age 73, a judge on the reservation, and Sherman Sage, age 63, the reservation's chief of police. They arrived at the Longmont train station on July 14, 1914, accompanied by Tom Crispin, a 38-year-old interpreter who was half Arapaho, half white, and well suited to the task.

A young Princeton student named David Hawkins came along to take notes. A local guide named Shep Husted led the horses. And a man named Oliver W. Toll, Miss Vaille's cousin, agreed to manage the whole expedition.

For two weeks, they rode. Past Poudre Lakes. Down the North Fork of the Colorado. Through Lulu City. By way of Flat Top and Hallett's Peak. They spent a night at Squeaky Bob's place on the Colorado. They visited the stone ruins of what local settlers had been calling "Indian Fort" near the Hondius Ranch.

Gun Griswold and Sherman Sage looked at those ruins and corrected the record. It was not an Indian fort in the general sense. It was the Apache Fort. The site of a specific battle, around 1855, when a party of fifty Apache arrived and clashed with the Arapaho across Beaver Park. Sherman Sage had been about four years old. He remembered it. He read the event from the stone markers the warriors had left, small and large piles placed according to custom to mark what happened where.

At the end of the trip, Toll and the three Arapaho men drove to the Agricultural College at Fort Collins and made dictaphone recordings of the Indian place names. The recordings sat in an archive. Most people driving Trail Ridge Road today have no idea any of this happened.

What Is Gianttrack Mountain?

High on the eastern ridge, there is a peak the Arapaho called hinenitee tohnooxeiht. It means, as directly as it can be translated: "where a person made tracks."

The story behind that name is short and has never been explained away.

Warriors traveling the ridge found footprints in the rock. Human footprints. The size of them was wrong. Too large. Much too large. The warriors looked at what was in front of them, and they turned around. They did not follow the tracks to see where they led.

That is the full account. No resolution. No explanation. No monster revealed and defeated. Just men who looked at something and decided the sensible response was to leave.

The name stayed. The mountain still carries it. If you have hiked that ridge and felt something uncomfortable about the scale of things up there, the Arapaho named that feeling a long time before you arrived.

What Did the Arapaho Believe About the Mummy Range?

The long ridge of pale rock that settlers called the Mummy Range for its silhouette had a different name and a different meaning in Arapaho tradition.

They called it nóókubéé3eino': White Owls.

In Arapaho belief, owls are not birds. They are ghosts. They represent night, cold, and winter. To name a mountain range after them is not decorative. It is explanatory.

According to the tradition Gun Griswold and Sherman Sage carried, the Mummy Range is the site of an ongoing battle between two powers: the White Owl, which represents night and winter, and the Thunderbird, which represents day and summer. The two have been fighting there since before anyone can remember.

Look at the range on the north side of Estes Park. Look at how much snow sits on it, and how long it stays. Look at what sits just to the west, a range that settlers named the Never Summer Mountains because the snow there never fully leaves.

The Arapaho explanation for why that part of the high country stays frozen most of the year is simple: the White Owl won.

Whether you read that as myth or as a remarkably accurate observation about regional snowpack and microclimate, the result is the same. The Arapaho named what they saw. They built a record of this place that lasted through displacement, through the establishment of a national park, through a century of tourism that mostly forgot they had ever been here.

What Did the Arapaho Know About Longs Peak?

The peak settlers named for Major Stephen H. Long, who spotted it from forty miles away and never actually approached it, was known to French trappers as Les Deux Oreilles, Two Ears, for the twin silhouette it cuts against the sky. The Arapaho knew the paired peaks as guides, landmarks that told you where you were from fifty miles in any direction.

On the summit, Gun Griswold's father, a noted warrior, hunter, and medicine man, had caught eagles many times over the years. The method was specific: he concealed himself near a stuffed coyote used as bait. When an eagle dropped to investigate, he grabbed it by the feet. The feathers were for war.

That summit was not a viewpoint. It was a working site. It had a specific use, a specific technique, and a specific man known for doing it well.

Before anybody climbed Longs Peak for the summit experience, someone was up there with a stuffed coyote.

What Happened to the Arapaho Names?

Some survived. Oliver Toll's report and the work of Louisa Ward Arps and Elinor Kingery, who compiled High Country Names, preserved a portion of what Griswold and Sage recorded in 1914. Trail Ridge Road follows, as Toll noted, practically the same route as the old Child's Trail. The Dog Trail up Fall River is named for the practice of using dogs to carry supplies.

Most of the names did not make it onto official maps. The peaks got English names. The ranges got English names. The trails got English names.

What remained is what two old men remembered on a two-week ride through their childhood, sixty years after they had last seen it.

The Circle is still the same shape it was. The White Owls still hold the north ridge. The tracks on hinenitee tohnooxeiht are still there, presumably.

Nobody has followed them yet.

Robert Lincoln “Squeaky Bob” Wheeler left his mark on Colorado history by turning adversity and rugged landscape into legend.

Known for his high-pitched voice—a childhood souvenir of bronchitis—Wheeler homesteaded 160 acres in Phantom Valley near present-day Rocky Mountain National Park around 1900.

He opened the Hotel de Hardscrabble in 1907, serving up hearty meals and stories that lured travelers and even President Theodore Roosevelt.

Sheets never changed, just dusted with talcum powder—yet guests happily returned for his legendary biscuits and hospitality.

Wheeler famously grew head lettuce on “useless” mountain soil, founding the Happy Lettuce Farm and earning a tidy sum while silencing doubters.

He and his wife Allie ran the ranch until he sold it in 1926.

Today, all that remains is a trailhead parking lot—proof that one man's determination outlasts even the mountains’ doubts.

The details in this story are rooted in well-documented local history, drawing on official Boulder County records and respected surveys by the National Park Service.

Community lore, particularly from Allenspark resident Edie DeWeese, whose family’s ties reach back to 1904, adds unique color — especially the tale of shotgun-salted mines.

While forensic evidence from the 1890s is absent, the core events of corporate fraud and a pivotal fake gold rush are supported by enduring town memory and official documents.

As with all compelling local history, some details fill in the natural gaps — shaped by generations who’ve learned how legend and truth often intermingle in this valley.

Enjoy the journey through Allenspark’s remarkable past.

In the summer of 1917, Rocky Mountain National Park faced a shortage of visitors, despite its spectacular scenery.

A.G. Birch of The Denver Post devised a bold publicity stunt, enlisting Denver receptionist Hazel Eighmy, giving her the persona of “Agnes Lowe,” and publicizing her barefoot trek into the wilds clad in a leopard-skin tunic.

Backed by park icon Enos Mills, Agnes’s supposed solo survival journey drew thousands of spectators and daily headlines.

Her wilderness messages, encounters with tourists, and a bizarre pursuit by “Adam the Apostle” fueled national fascination.

In reality, Agnes met with a ranger for rest and supplies each night, a fact revealed only after the event.

The spectacle succeeded: attendance at RMNP more than doubled that year.

The legend of Agnes Lowe vanished, but the park’s fame—and the tale’s intrigue—endure to this day.