Flashback: 20 Years Ago in Colorado Central Magazine

Waste It To Save Your Community

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.

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Colorado’s Three Native Cats

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.)

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George Sibley: Down on the Ground with Chicago and L.A.

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?”

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Classic Ed Quillen: The Namesake of Mt. Elbert

First Published in Colorado Central Magazine, May 1998

By Ed Quillen

samuel-elbert_webSamuel 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.

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Quillen’s Corner – The Great Wyoming Hippie Hoax Revisited

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 …

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Quillen’s Corner – Changing Times Cause Conflict

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 …

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On the Ground – Are We Part of a City-State?

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 …

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Quillen’s Corner – History Isn’t What it Used to Be

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, …

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Breaking the Shackles of Time

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.

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Coming soon: A New Ed Quillen Anthology

A daughter compiles a collection of her late father’s columns.

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.

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The Caboose

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.

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Ed Quillen

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.

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Down on the Ground with The Bard

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.

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Who’s in Charge of Immigration?

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?

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Church and State

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.

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Home

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.”

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Isolation

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.

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Book Review

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.

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Quillen’s Corner

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.”

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Quillen’s Corner

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.”

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The Civil War and Us

 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.”

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The Costs of Altitude

Aerial view of Mt.Ouray and Mt. Chipeta, Colorado by Dan Downing.

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.

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Election Season Blues

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.”

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How Christo’s critics can change your mind

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.

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Down the river of inaccuracy

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.

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The benefits of doing something stupid

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.

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Book review: Brothers on the Bashkaus

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.

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Quillen’s Corner

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.

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Quillen’s Corner – March 2009

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.

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Regional Roundup

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.

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Politics, power, and hard times

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.

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Colorado 1870-2000 II, by John Fielder, et al.

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

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The long and winding ballot

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.

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Accurate local numbers are hard to find

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?

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When presidents came to town

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.

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Regional Roundup

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.”

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The Ranching Way of Life, by ScSEED

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

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