Pam Grout - Colorado Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff

Pam Grout is a mother, a playwright, an activist, and a collector of quotes and quirky information. She has written fifteen books, including three for National Geographic. She writes an award-winning travel column called Now, Where Was I?, is a stringer for People magazine, and has been published by the Washington Post, Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal, Scientific American Explorations, and many others. For more information about Pams books, her second career as a speaker, and her outside-the-box view of reality, check out her sometimes-updated Web site at www.pamgrout.com.

This book is still for Jim Dick, who dreams of climbing all fifty-four of Colorados 14-footers

I d like to give a big group hug to Beth Buehler, Jane Chaney, Rob Strickland, April Prout, Glo Cunningham, and all my other crazy Crested Butte hosts. Thank you for tromping around taking photos, for answering my endless questions, and for demonstrating just how much fun a job can be. I feel compelled to add that I still think my teams entry in the snow-building competition should have placed first.

Id also like to thank Katie Singer, Ashley Boling (who gives super-fun historical tours of Telluride), Jerry Greene, Iris Willow, Nancy Wicks, Marcie Telander, Patricia Maher, Lori Giggey, Ed Eaton, Doc Phillips, Steph Hilliard, Randi Lowenthal, Roxie from Fruita, Marne Jurgemeyer, Rich Grant, and everyone else from the great state of Colorado who helped me secure photos and other important tidbits.

Id like to thank Globe Pequots own Gillian Belnap for her immeasurable patience in dealing with my technological deficiencies, especially my inability to figure out on which side of a photo the blue dot should be adhered. Thanks again to Mary Norris, Erin Turner, John Burbidge, and everyone else at Globe Pequot Press who keeps me from having to get a real job.

And, as always, a big hug to Tasman McKay Grout, my unflappable fifteen-year-old.

H aving the opportunity to revise this book was like pulling a winter coat out of the closet and finding a forgotten $100 bill stuffed in the pocket. By the time an author turns in a manuscript, the last thing he or she wants to do is reread it. Not for a while. After sitting down at a typewriter and opening a vein, as sportswriter Red Smith so famously described the act of writing, an author needs time to breathe, to walk, to think about other things. So to go back to a book four years later and find a $100 bill, well, thats a treat. It could have been a five-spot.

Even more exciting is that the great state of Colorado is every bit as eccentric and quirky today as it was four years ago. In fact, the hardest part about revising this book was deciding which attractions to leave in and which to replace. When youre as attached to Headless Mike and flying fruitcakes as I am, updating a book becomes a regular Sophies Choice. I mean, how could anyone entertain the idea of being disloyal to Bishops Castle or Frozen Dead Guy Days?

All I can say is, Enjoy! And look for the sequel.

I am not eccentric. Im just more alive than most people. I am an electric eel in a pond of goldfish.

Edith Sitwell

W hen youre raised in Kansas like I was, you cant wait to grow up and move to Colorado. Its an indisputable fact, same as pi = 3.1459265, just like thank you notes need to be sent after baby showers.

In fact, when you grow up in Kansas, grown-ups dont ask, What do you want to be when you grow up? They ask, Where do you want to be?

And the answer, for those of us who spent our formative years in the Sunflower State, is pretty much universal: Colorado. We want to live where we spent our summer vacationsin Estes Park, where we fed peanuts to chipmunks; at the Garden of the Gods, where our dads snapped Polaroids of us pretending to hold up Balanced Rock; at Cripple Creek, where we booed the villains at the yearly melodrama.

Of course, back then, we thought we wanted to move west for the mountains, for the air that smelled like something from an aerosol can, for the ski instructors that put Billy Deewater, the wheat farmers son we all had crushes on, to shame.

But when I finally did move to Colorado, I realized that while the views, the air, and the cute ski instructors are certainly perks, the real beauty of Colorado is in the mindset of the people, in the willingness of Coloradoans to try new things, to step out of the box, to see the world differently than CNN says it is.

While the rest of the country obsesses about unemployment rates, Coloradoans create jobs building horses out of car bumpers, squeezing themselves into 20-inch Plexiglas cubes, and memorizing zip codes. While other states tsk-tsk Janet Jacksons breast, Coloradoans skate-board nude, host tele-a-thongs, and throw parties where everyone comes naked except for raincoats. While the politicos fret about high oil prices, Coloradoans build solar ovens, greenhouses, and lawn mowers. I even found a guy in Crawford who built a solar bubble machine.

Checks and balances are what Colorado is all about.

Some blame it on the altitude, say a persons brain goes fuzzy when it resides at 9,800 feet, claim its not natural to make dragons out of hubcaps, to give awards for beer drinker of the year. All I know is that the people of Colorado know things the rest of the world seems to have forgotten: that having a good time is a good thing, and that viewing life as a grand and glorious adventure is a valuable endeavor.

Eastern Colorado

Being eastern Colorado is like being Julia Roberts sister.

Julia Roberts has a sister?

See what I mean?

You know that Bette Midler ditty, Wind Beneath My Wings, the one about being cold there in my shadow? Well, that could be the theme song for eastern Colorado. Just look at any Colorado map. Your eye is immediately drawn to all that dramatic green and brown and purple on the western side of the state. It isnt fair. Why should Aspen, Vail, and Telluride get all the glory when Punkin Center, Swink, and Haxton go uncelebrated?

If Comanche Grasslands, Bents Old Fort, and Junkrassic Park were in any other state, theyd be household names. Tourists would flock. But instead, they pulled the unlucky straw of sitting next door to fifty-four 14,000-foot mountains.

Thats the mission of this chapter. To rectify a gross injustice. Eastern Colorado has exotic luxury carousels, the worlds longest mural, dinosaur tracks, and prairie chickens who jump in the air, turn circles, and put Jim Carreys antics to shame.

There also happen to be dozens of jaw-dropping, every-bit-as-stunning hikes in eastern Colorado, only instead of going up, you go downinto canyons with prehistoric petroglyphs and mammoth calabaza plants that dip beneath the prairie. Suffice it to say, Julia Roberts sister is one heck of a gal.