Colorado Central Magazine

10/30/2023

A Letter from Sam Hartsel, dated August 24, 1876.

The condensed story was published in the South Park Supplement, Oct. 2023.
The full story was published in Colorado Central Magazine, Jan/Feb 2023. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZQypKTfbNltUvwJhd8Y40tq1VQcZl2Go/view?usp=sharing

Sam's letter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12L_ifacIR628-FzUMEW3CiBDh7whZJBF/view?usp=sharing

Envelope addressed to Uncle Jacoby: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KNvdRBlH5-dKqvWxn3SgvHrA9ltR7F41/view?usp=sharing

09/30/2023

His writing, knowledge, and good humor will be deeply missed.

Yesterday we lost a friend. Forrest Whitman, how do we even begin to describe you? On The Rails, which showcased your infectious passion for trains, is the longest running podcast in KHEN history. But it wasn't just your love of trains on the air--it was YOU and all the things that make you an amazing human being.

Your incredible humor, intelligence and generosity will always be missed, both at the KHEN station and in the community. There's no one quite like you, Forrest! We will miss you more than we can say. Rest in peace, friend. ♥

09/24/2023

Have you ever checked out the massive (and free) archive Colorado Central has online? Check out this 2018 article

Colorado Central Magazine - Wit, Wisdom and News from around Colorado

09/21/2023

Colorado Central contributor and former owner Mike Rosso helped co-found this event 20 years ago! So get out there Saturday and say hello!

It's CHICKENSTOCK 20th Anniversary celebration Saturday!!
Still Clucking after all these years ! Make Someone Smile Today

09/21/2023

Greetings! Alyssa Meier and I (Jordan Hedberg) are pleased to announce that we are the proud new owners of Colorado Central Magazine! A complete introduction will be printed in the October edition of the Colorado Central, but the short version is that we have loved this publication for decades and are honored to keep the tradition alive. We also own the 140-year-old Wet Mountain Tribune newspaper in neighboring Westcliffe. When we are not slinging ink and paper, we are raising and selling grassfed beef.

We want to thank Cailey McDermott for her generosity and for making this ownership transition a time to meet new people and make new friends. We also want to thank the former owner of Colorado Central, Mike Rosso, for his sage advice and encouragement.

One of the biggest challenges with the Pueblo Chieftain printing press shutting down in late August was finding a new printer for Colorado Central. Thankfully, Schusters’ Printing in Pueblo, who was already printing the high-quality covers, will now be able to print the entire magazine for us. This means the paper will be of much higher quality, compared to newsprint, and will help make the images pop and the type easier to read.

The Wet Mountain Tribune has been printing at the Mountain Mail for 44 years, and we are blessed that Cailey is their new editor. In addition, the new owner of the Mountain Mail, Jim O’Rourke has been a fantastic person to get to know. We appreciate his advice plus keeping the newspaper press at the Mountain Mail running.

It is an exciting time to be a writer, and we look forward to sharing the stories, history, art, culture, people, successes, and issues of this region with our readers.

Read the huge archive of Colorado Central has to offer at https://www.coloradocentralmagazine.com

08/04/2023

AUGUST 5 IS THE ANNIVERSARY of the Mann Gulch Fire in 1949 near Helena, Montana. On that fateful day, temperatures were in the high 90s. From the fuselage side-door of a Douglas DC-3/C-47 aircraft, 15 smokejumpers fell from the sky and landed in the wilds of the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness. Their day was over in less than two hours ­— their boots hit the ground just after 4 p.m. and they perished before 6 p.m. It has been estimated that 3,000 acres burned in 10 minutes during its “blow-up” stage, with the fire eventually burning 4,500 acres across five days. The fire had started with a bolt of lightning.
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08/03/2023

THE FORT GARLAND MUSEUM and Cultural Center continues to establish unique exhibits that highlight not just an honest look at local history but also combine that with art, poetry and more to create immersive cultural experiences. Their newest exhibit, buffalo soldiers: reVision opened on June 24 and follows in the same vein of striking, multifaceted artwork to tell a story often overlooked by history.
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08/02/2023

WHEN HUMANS EXPERIENCE trauma, a natural response is to avoid the source of it. But, perhaps, if you are an extraordinary individual, you might embrace the trauma for the lessons and silver linings that it can teach.

One cold winter morning in the still-darkness of rural Illinois, then 17 year-old artist, Andy Mast, son of Amish parents, went out to the barn to let his horse out to pasture. When he did not return to the house in a reasonable amount of time, his father went out to find him unconscious atop their mangled metal gate, his horse standing over him.
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08/01/2023

Happy August 1 to me! Once fixed, I'll update the site. Sorry everyone.

07/07/2023

DESPITE DAD'S BEST EFFORTS, somewhere along the way, I lost the fishing gene. I enjoy fishing; for Dad, though, fishing was serious business.

Family vacations meant camping at Horsetooth Reservoir, west of Fort Collins. Like clockwork every morning, long before sunrise, Dad would wake my older brother and me. We’d dress in the dark, gather our gear and head off on an hour-long hike to the other side of the cove. Why we couldn’t just walk to the shore a hundred yards from the tent I never understood.
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07/06/2023

I FIRST MET FORREST Whitman at a Heart of the Rockies Wedding Association vendor show in 2011. I attended in support of a few of my friends who were modeling wedding dresses at the Salida SteamPlant event. To attend, I had to make up a wedding date on the spot. I chose a random, even-numbered summer date two years out. (I was single at the time.)
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07/05/2023

SEVEN MILES ABOVE MAYSVILLE lies a ghost town that is barely remembered but is worthy of mention. It was called Shavano, taking its name from the 14,231-foot mountain towering above it. Mount Shavano is home to the much heralded “Angel of Shavano,” the figure of an angel with outspread wings, which is visible with the right amount of snow during spring. According to legend, two young Ute men once fought to the death over a young woman called Corntassel. But when the mortally wounded loser killed Corntassel, a drought spread over the land. The tribe left their land and made their way to Arkansas Valley, where they saw the giant snow angel on the mountain. Believing it was a sign from Corntassel’s spirit, they planted and successfully harvested corn. Or at least, that is one story.
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06/18/2023

We were proud be a FIBArk sponsor this year! This ever growing and changing event is put on entirely by volunteers. It’s pretty impressive! We love this community!!

06/02/2023

THE ONLY PICTURES I have of coyotes are carcasses, left in the pasture after they got a little too close to the herd where our three guard dogs schooled them as to boundaries. In over 10 years of running a herd of about 300 ewes and nannies with three Great Pyrenees guard dogs — who brought the herd into the barn from pasture every night — our confirmed loss to coyote predation was zero.

Of course, people point out: how would I know, given that coyotes are clever and fast and seldom seen. Point taken. However, we did not find carcasses or bones in the pasture, except in the case of a sick animal — and sheep and goats have a higher herd mortality rate than cattle — in which case the coyotes were there to clean it up.
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06/01/2023

DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT where your recycling goes after you place it in the bin? Do you ever contemplate the ever-increasing mounds of trash in the landfills and wonder how it is affecting climate change?

Well, John Armstrong, of Salida, thinks about these things all the time. He has been re-imagining a state-of-the-art recycling facility for Chaffee County. “I have always had a passion for sustainability and clean infrastructure,” he said, citing a college entrepreneurial attempt at a badly timed, but well-intentioned, biodiesel company. “Although that company did not survive, I never lost the drive for entrepreneurship and doing something that helped the environment and the community.”
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05/31/2023

PERCHED UP ON A HILLSIDE, barely visible from Highway 285, rests the historic Centerville Cemetery off a dead-end county road. Known as Chaffee County’s oldest burial ground, it holds 350 overlooking the beautiful Sawatch Range’s southern tip.

Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine that peaceful site contains the remains of many who participated in the deadly “Lake County War,” which began on the night of June 17, 1874, and culminated in numerous deaths. According to an August 2014 Colorado Central Magazine article by the late Charles F. Price, “At least ten and perhaps as many as a hundred individuals — no one is sure of the number — died during this struggle between 1874 and 1881, some lynched, others shot and some as a result of the shock and grief resulting from the violence.”
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05/26/2023

Sneak peak of the June cover! Artwork by Leslie Jorgensen!
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Interested in being on the cover? Reach out!
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05/04/2023

TWO CENTRAL COLORADO ARTISTS were among eight Colorado artists selected to participate in the Colorado Art Science Environment Fellowship, a program that connects artists with University of Colorado Boulder scientists and educators to visually explore the climate crisis in their own communities. “We could essentially choose any environmental issue that affected the way our community functioned,” said selected artist, Jocelyn Catterson.
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05/03/2023

IN TELLER COUNTER, THE ABANDONED town site of Gillett lies just beyond Cripple Creek and Divide, near the intersection of County Roads 67 and 81 (Lazy S Ranch Road). It looks uninteresting, amounting to nothing more than a field with a couple of modern homes near the road.
Gillett began as a simple log cabin. But in anticipation of the arrival of the Midland Terminal Railway from Divide, a land company purchased the valley and filed for a townsite.
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05/02/2023

A PERSON CAN GET LOST IN A MAZE, but not in a labyrinth. “In a labyrinth you end where you began,” explained Alfonso Abeyta. He is a main member of a volunteer committee in Conejos in the San Luis Valley who have built a unique structure known as the El Santuario de los Pobladores, or the Sanctuary of the Settlers. “We have had visitors and interest from all over the United States. It’s one of a kind,” said Abeyta.
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04/24/2023

Sneak peek of the happy, colorful May cover by kerstinstockart! Did you know, Colorado Central Magazine is now the only locally owned print publisher in Chaffee County?!
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04/07/2023

A FEW YEARS BACK we visited relatives on their small farm in Vermont. I had never been that far northeast. It was lush and green with healthy woodlands bordering the roads. One night we gathered around a large fire. As folks began heading to bed, I looked back at the fire and asked our cousin, “Aren’t you going to put the fire out?”He replied casually that the fire would die out on its own. Having grown up in the arid West, where historic wildfires now rage year-round, I was astonished at his response. I asked further questions, but the climate is so different and wet in the East, I could not get my cousin to understand my concern.
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04/06/2023

ARE YOU BIG FOOT THRASHING through the wilds or are you Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips?

Any number of carbon footprint scoring mechanisms can be found on the internet. With a simple search you will be inundated — government agencies, conservation groups and energy/utility companies offer calculators. Some are simple and some are complex. Cruising through some of the websites, obviously there are numerous algorithms and a lot of math in the background that the average user cannot see, let alone understand.
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04/05/2023

A NUMBER OF “wildfire risk reduction” projects are proposed or already underway across tens of millions of acres of national forests in the western U.S., including Pike and San Isabel and 3.5 million acres of the Front Range in Colorado. The 2021 Infrastructure bill allocated over $3 billion — with Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, Sen. John Hickenlooper and Rep. Jason Crow seeking another $60 billion — to the U.S. Forest Service in the hopes of “reducing exposure of people, communities and natural resources to the risk of catastrophic wildfire.” Add an Emergency Action that expedites the removal of “hazardous fuels” while skirting legal challenges from conservationists, and our public forests may be seeing more activity than they have in several decades.
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04/04/2023

Sneak peek of the April cover by Gunnison artist: Cheryl Pettigrew! This one has a wildfire theme. They were mailed out today, so check your mailboxes this week!
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04/02/2023

Did you hear?! My booth won Best in Show!! Come hang out in my award-winning booth today. ALSO, it’s doctor approved.
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04/01/2023

We’re all set up at the Chaffee County Home and Garden show! Come visit us this weekend!
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03/29/2023

Home and Garden Show Special!! Subscribe in person at the Chaffee County Fairgrounds Saturday 9-5 or Sunday 10-4! OR subscribe online to get in on this hot deal!
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