Essay by Ed Quillen, July 1998
IN THE REST of the temperate world, “spring” means a season of blossoms, greenery and gentle showers. Here in the mountains, it means wind or blistering heat alternating with blizzards – often within the hour, accompanied by landslips and rockslides.
By Ed Quillen
(Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the May 1999 issue of Colorado Central Magazine. Since that time, it has consistently been one of the top accessed posts on our website, coloradocentralmagazine.com. We’re not sure what the reason is for that, but we thought we’d share the original article with our print readers.)
By George Sibley
A quarter-century ago, shortly before starting this magazine, Ed Quillen wrote a major essay for High Country News – preceded by a two-day conference in Denver Ed had instigated with HCN publisher Ed Marston and the Pacific Foundation, assembling a motley of regional journalists, environmentalists, educators and other western thinkers to explore the question (slightly subversive, given the location): “Is Denver necessary?”
First Published in Colorado Central Magazine, May 1998
By Ed Quillen
Samuel Hitt Elbert, whose name adorns Colorado’s highest peak, was born in Ohio on April 3, 1833. He grew up in Iowa and was graduated with honors from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1854. He then studied law and was admitted to that state’s bar in 1856.
by Martha Quillen Two score and six years ago, Ed Quillen and some of his friends started musing about whether Wyoming could be taken over by hippies (in a nonviolent manner, of course). It was a crazy idea, but the events unfolding in 1969 almost made it seem feasible. Student riots, sit-ins, and demonstrations rocked …
I went to Aspen last weekend because Ed’s book, Deeper Into the Heart of the Rockies, which was compiled and edited by our daughter Abby, was a finalist in the Colorado Humanities 23rd annual book awards. We didn’t win, but it was nice to see the stunned joy other writers displayed upon winning. Perhaps more …
by George Sibley Badmouthing Denver and the Front Range metropolis that it has seeded is a pretty common sport in the nonmetropolitan parts of Colorado. But, we probably ought to all be asking ourselves if this isn’t a little disingenuous, and try to clarify our real water relationship with Denver. The water planning process the …
by George Sibley Will work for food: the garden season is upon us again. We’re learning that with a few wheelbarrows of compost, a few more of aged horse manure, and a lot of “Gunnison Gold” (an earthy mix of wood chips with sludge from the wastewater plant), all mixed and dug in with a …
by Martha Quillen It’s no mystery why the story of the first Thanksgiving became an inspirational legend. The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in December of 1620 (393 years ago this month) and stayed aboard the Mayflower, where they died by the dozens. They were sick and discouraged until March, when an English-speaking native hailed them, …
By Abby Quillen
As many know, my dad died last summer, and I’ve been compiling an anthology of his work. By November 1, Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies will be available on amazon.com and at select bookstores.
Occasionally, over the months of anthologizing, I’ve needed to access my dad’s email account to retrieve an address. It’s creepy to see press releases, pitches, newsletters and advertorials still piling up there, five or six of them a day with cheerful salutations – “Hello Mr. Quillen!” “Congratulations!” I haven’t read much of my dad’s actual correspondence, because it still feels like I’d be violating his privacy. But occasionally I’ll click on a message, and there’s my dad’s voice on the screen – unpolished, off-the-cuff, typos and all.
Popular Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen died suddenly last June, leaving behind a lifetime of writing, including thousands of weekly columns.
Abby Quillen, his daughter, is compiling his later columns into a sequel to his 1998 collection, Deep in the Heart of the Rockies. The new anthology will be entitled Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies, and the release date is scheduled for November 1. The book will include 120 of Quillen’s best columns published between 1999 and 2012.
by Forrest Whitman
Ed Quillen Catches the Westbound
Back in my brakeman days we’d say: “He caught the westbound.” That feels right for Ed, because he was a rail guy. Of course he was many other things which will be written about in this issue of Colorado Central. We’ll remember him especially as a loving, humorous and involved husband and father. He will be remembered as the crucial publicist for The Colorado Trail, as a great Colorado historian, a progressive columnist, founder of this very magazine, curmudgeon (never really true), definer of Colorado’s red zones as “stupid zones,” and above all really funny writer. But, I’ll remember him as a rail guy.
By now many of our readers are probably aware that Ed Quillen, the founder of Colorado Central Magazine, passed away in early June. Ed was 61 years old and died of a heart attack while enjoying one of his favorite pastimes, reading a history book. His musings were a staple of this magazine and his columns in The Denver Post were enjoyed by many in Colorado and beyond.
By George Sibley
“In the hope you don’t produce too much civilization in the Gunnison Country.” – Inscription in “Deep in the Heart of the Rockies”
No one had thought this would happen so soon – the challenge of how to remember Ed Quillen. When I think about Quillen, I’m always thinking ahead to something – how best to fit a Quillen diatribe into the next Headwaters conference at Western State, whether there was time on the upcoming trip to Denver to stop in Salida for a cup of coffee, wondering what next Sunday’s column would be about, writing him an email about this Sunday’s column.
By Ed Quillen
Sometimes I feel derelict in my duties as a citizen. For instance, I avoided paying much attention to the recent arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court about the Affordable Care Act. Like everyone else, I have only so much attention, and I’d rather focus it on things I might be able to do something about. It’s not as though you can write to a Supreme Court justice the way you can write to your congressman (although our congressman has never paid any attention to anything I’ve written).
Further, often it’s easy to predict how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule: 5-4 in favor of Money. This goes back some years. Colorado used to have a law that banned paid petition circulators. It made sense to me; if the state has the power to forbid the buying and selling of votes, why not the power to forbid the buying and selling of petition signatures?
By Ed Quillen
Although I was born in 1950 and was thus around for the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, I don’t remember them at all. Such recollections start with 1960, John F. Kennedy vs. Richard M. Nixon. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wentworth, had us follow the campaign. We had to bring in a campaign clipping every week for current events, and we were supposed to catch the debates – which I did on radio, because our family didn’t have a TV at the time.
That said, I don’t remember much of it. My parents and Mrs. Wentworth and just about every other adult I encountered were all for Nixon, and that there was some concern about Kennedy’s being a Roman Catholic. As best I can remember, the argument was that as a Catholic, JFK was obliged to obey the Pope, who was not only the head of a church but also the head of a sovereign nation, the Vatican City. And the President of the United States should not be obliged to obey a foreign ruler.
By Ed Quillen
What “home” means to you often depends on where you grew up. For me, growing up in high and dry Colorado, “HOMES” was a mnemonic, a memory aid, for remembering the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Even though they were hundreds of miles away, we were expected to learn them in grade-school geography.
But Martha, who grew up in Michigan, had never heard of HOMES for the Great Lakes. There, she said, “you just know the names of the Great Lakes. Kind of like you Colorado kids just knew that Elbert and Massive were the state’s two highest peaks.”
By Ed Quillen
One of the obscure pleasures of life in a little mountain town is the occasional dose of isolation. It snows all day with strong wind. The roads are closed, the phone and power lines go down. You have no idea what’s going on in the rest of the world, and you don’t really care because you couldn’t get there anyway. You’re just playing cribbage at home by lantern light while a wood fire cheers and warms.
The Legend of Benjamin Ratcliff: From Family Tragedy to Legacy of Resilience
by Chris O. Andrew
Published in 2011 by the author
ISBN 078-193266786-8
Reviewed by Ed Quillen
It’s a safe bet that most family trees have some branches that nobody much wants to talk about, but few have a branch like this one. Benjamin Ratcliff, a Civil War veteran and rancher in South Park, shot and killed three members of his local school board on May 6, 1895.
By Ed Quillen
Names on our Land
Place names have long fascinated me, and perhaps for that reason, I try to use the right ones, and it grates on me when I hear the wrong name.
For instance, the eminence at the end of F Street across the river from Salida is Tenderfoot Hill, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which is pretty much the authority on these matters, although for reasons I will explain later, I don’t go by the U.S.G.S. in all matters. The hill with the big letter and the gazebo on top is not “Mt. Tenderfoot,” and I fight the urge to start shouting about ignorance when someone calls it “S Mountain.”
By Ed Quillen
Perhaps no document except the Bible gets parsed and analyzed as much as the U.S. Constitution. There are those who take the Bible literally and those who see it as mostly metaphor, and there are those who want to apply “strict construction” to the federal constitution, and those who are comfortable with a looser interpretation.
The basic argument on “strict construction” is that the federal government is a government of limited powers, and unless those powers are specified in the federal constitution, then the Tenth Amendment applies: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
By Ed Quillen
The American Civil War, whose sesquicentennial begins this month, started years before there was a place named Salida, and even its nearest battles were hundreds of miles away.
Even so, there’s a big stone memorial that faces F Street from Riverside Park behind a park bench. The letters are getting indistinct, but they remain legible if you get close: “Our Honored Heroes. 1861-1865. Erected by Salida Circle No. 12 Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic Department of Colorado and Wyoming, A.D. 1916.”
By Ed Quillen
If the United States had adopted the metric system in 1820, then Colorado’s highest country might be in better condition today with much less in the way of trail erosion, trampled tundra and disturbed wildlife.
Why 1820? The metric system had been devised by the French Academy of Sciences in 1795, so by 1820, Americans certainly knew about it. And 1820 marked the first recorded climb of a 14,000-foot peak in America.
Consider that “4,267.21-meter summit” lacks the resonance and romance of “14,000-foot peak” or just “Fourteener.” And without that arbitrary line in the sky, few of Colorado’s 54 Fourteeners would suffer the traffic they bear today.
By Ed Quillen
In ways, I miss the old-fashioned Election Day. Our precinct polling place was across the street from our house, and I work at home. I’d look out the front window, and when I didn’t see many cars parked, I knew there wouldn’t be much of a line.
Now we have “voting centers,” and ours is four blocks away, too far for easy traffic observation. So it’s easier just to vote early, which makes the whole concept of Election Day rather meaningless. It’s more like “Election Season.”
by Ed Quillen
The first time I heard of “Over the River” was about the time Martha and I started this magazine, circa 1994. Christo and Jeanne Claude held a meeting in Salida, which I didn’t attend because I didn’t care.
So what if some loopy artist proposed to suspend fabric panels across the Arkansas River for a few days? It’s not as though the valley between Salida and Cañon City is a pristine wilderness or immaculate wildlife refuge.
by Ed Quillen
Granted, I can be quite the nit-picker sometimes, especially when I’m reading a book that rubs me the wrong way. Such was the case with Running Dry: A Journey from Source to Sea Down the Colorado River, written by Jonathan Waterman and published in 2010 by National Geographic.
No writer gets everything perfectly. That’s why we need editors, preferably several of them. I expected better from an organization as prestigious as the National Geographic Society.
by Ed Quillen
One way to meet good people in Central Colorado is to do something stupid. I learned that atop Kenosha Pass on the afternoon of February 5.
Martha and I were on our way from Salida to Longmont, where we were supposed to go out to dinner with my brothers and their wives, along with my parents, to celebrate my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary (in case you’re curious, I was born nine months and one week after their wedding).
Since driving at night has become something of a challenge for me, we left around noon to be sure of a daylight arrival. We took our dog Bodie with us, even though he’s not a good traveler. He’s a car-chasing idiot, and when he rides in the camper shell, he sees plenty of cars to “chase” by running around in circles and barking a lot.
by Eugene Buchanan
Published in 2007 by Fulcrum
ISBN 978-1-55591-608-4
Reviewed by Ed Quillen
In the summer of 1993, Eugene Buchanan and three fellow American floaters arrived at the Moscow airport, where they were supposed to meet André to run the Kalar River in Siberia. Except André was in Turkey with no firm return date, but he’d told his friend Boris, part of a Latvian river-running team, and Boris wanted them to join a trip down the rapids of the Bashkaus River, also in Siberia.
Ever since the 2000 presidential election, it’s been fashionable to divide America into “Red States” and “Blue States.” That’s because the major television networks used maps that showed George W. Bush states in red and Al Gore states in blue.
At first glance, it might be hard to say which is the bigger controversy hereabouts: Christo’s plan to drape the Arkansas River, or Nestlé’s plan to haul water to a plant in Denver to be bottled and sold as Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.
Although I have been pulled over a few times in the past dozen years, no traffic tickets have resulted from these meetings with the constabulary. Thus I have been able to renew my driver’s license by mail, without the hassle of taking the test to determine whether I still know the rules of the road.
Review by Ed Quillen
History – January 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine
A Tenderfoot in Colorado
by Richard Baxter Townshend
First published in 1923
Published in 2008 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 978-0-87081-938-4
Brief by Ed Quillen
Local News – January 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine
We officially start our seasons by the equinoxes (roughly March 22 and Sept. 22, when the day and night are the same length) and the solstices (longest day about June 22 and shortest about Dec. 22). And by that measure, winter started this year on Dec. 21.
Around here, though, we might observe that summer actually starts with the opening of passes that are normally closed in the winter: Marshall, Cottonwood, Independence, Old Monarch, Hagerman, Mosquito, etc. And the season ends when those roads close.
Essay by Ed Quillen
Politics – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
GRANTED, I was reasonably happy with the outcome of this year’s election, at least on the state and national level. On the local level, there hasn’t been much good news lately. We can start with the local economy.
Development of the Climax Mine above Leadville is pretty much on hold, and one of Salida’s better employers, BBI International, announced it was closing its office here and laying off 25 to 30 full-time employees.
Review by Ed Quillen
Colorado – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Colorado 1870-2000 II – Historical photography by William Henry Jackson Contemporary rephotography by John Fielder
Text by Gillian Klucas
Published in 2005 by Westcliffe Publishers in conjunction with the Colorado Historical Society
ISBN 978-1-56579-566-2
Review by Ed Quillen
Biography – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Speck – The Life and Times of Spencer Penrose
by Robert C. Olson
Published in 2008 by Western Reflections
ISBN 978-1-932738-50-6
Review by Ed Quillen
Tourism – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Backroads & Byways of Colorado Drives, Day Trips & Weekend Excursions
by John Daters & Drea Knufken
Published in 2008 by the Countryman Press
ISBN 978-0-88150-787-4
Essay by Ed Quillen
Politics – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
BY THE TIME this arrives in your mail, early voting will have already started in Colorado. I’ll likely take advantage of it, given the length of this year’s ballot and thus the likelihood of long lines at the polling place.
Review by Ed Quillen
Outdoors – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Hiking Colorado’s Roadless Trails
by Penelope Purdy
Published in 2008
by the Colorado Mountain Club Press
ISBN 978-0-97605250-79
Essay by Ed Quillen
Energy – September 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
LAST WINTER, with fuel costs rising, I talked with a writer about some articles focusing on energy in Central Colorado. The plan was abandoned for a variety of reasons, but one big reason was that it seemed almost impossible to draw up an “energy budget” for our region.
That is, how much energy do we produce? How much do we consume? How will rising petroleum prices affect us, and how might we best cope? With a regional economy that relies heavily on auto-based tourism, what happens when potential visitors decide it’s too expensive to drive here?
Article by Ed Quillen
History – September 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
These days, presidential campaigns don’t venture into Central Colorado. Pueblo or Grand Junction is about as close as they get.
But this relative isolation of Central Colorado from national politicians and their campaigns is rather recent. From 1880 to 1952, they came through often.
We can start with a visit in July of 1880 by Ulysses S. Grant, who rode the narrow-gauge rails west to Salida, then crossed Marshall Pass in a four-horse Sanderson stage to Gunnison and mining camps in Taylor Park. After returning to Salida, Grant proceeded to Leadville to assist in celebrating the arrival of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
Brief by Ed Quillen
Local News – September 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Politics makes for no bedfellows?
There is the old saying that “Politics makes for strange bedfellows.” There was also the observation, 40 years ago after Lurleen Wallace succeeded her husband as governor of Alabama, that “Bedfellows make for strange politics.”
Review by Ed Quillen
Ranching – August 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Ranching Way of Life – San Luis Valley, Colorado
DVD released in 2008
by Saguache County Sustainable Environment and Economic Development (ScSEED)
P.O. Box 393, Moffat CO 81143
www.scseed.org
ISBN: None
Review by Ed Quillen
Mountains – August 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Colorado’s San Juan Mountains with historic photos by Joseph Collier
by Grant Collier
Published in 2008 by Collier Publishing
ISBN 978-0-9768218-5-1
