Colorado Rocky Mountain Quotes

I like the mountains because they make me feel small,' Jeff says. 'They help me sort out what's important in life.

When Hannah Hudson finds herself abandoned on a Rocky Mountain ranch, even a lottery win doesn’t change her bad-luck life.

Ah, Colorado: the one place in America where people wake up earlier on weekends than workdays.

It's a tough lesson: There is no summit that comes before you expect it.

Having obviously forgiven me for the incident on the Starship, Stevie Wonder turned up one day and took out a snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To pre-empt your question: no, I have absolutely no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully piloted a snowmobile through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without killing himself, or indeed anyone else, in the process, but he did.

I just love all this,' Walt says. 'The sights, the smells, making the effort and pushing yourself and getting something that's really hard to get. I'll fly on a plane and people will look out the window at thirty thousand feet and say, 'Isn't this view good enough for you?' And I say no, it's not good enough. I didn't earn it. In the mountains, I earn it.

I was still a boy when I left the Ozarks, only sixteen years old. Since that day, I’ve left my footprints in many lands: the frozen wastelands of the Arctic, the bush country of Old Mexico, and the steaming jungles of Yucatán. Throughout my life, I’ve been a lover of the great outdoors. I have built campfires in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and hunted wild turkey in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I have climbed the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, and hunted bull elk in the primitive area of Idaho. I can truthfully say that, regardless of where I have roamed or wandered, I have always looked for the fairy ring. I have never found one, but I’ll keep looking and hoping. If the day ever comes that I walk up to that snow-white circle, I’ll step into the center of it, kneel down, and make one wish, for in my heart I believe in the legend of the rare fairy ring.

The Rockies are therefore very young and should never be thought of as ancient. They are still in the process of building and eroding, and no one today can calculate what they will look like ten million years from now. They have the extravagant beauty of youth, the allure of adolescence, and they are mountains to be loved.

Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails.) Multiply it by six million years, and you’ve carved the Grand Canyon. Take the creeping pace of which the continents move (about two inches per year on average, or roughly as fast as your fingernails grow). Stretch that over thirty million years, and a continent will travel nearly 1,000 miles. Stretch that over a few billions years, and continents will have time to wander from the tropics to the poles and back, crunching together to assemble super-continents, break apart into new configurations- and do all of that again several times over. Deep time, it could be said, is Nature’s way of giving the Earth room for its history. The recognition of deep time might be geology’s paramount contribution to human knowledge.

Colorado and Wyoming are America’s highest states, averaging 6,800 feet and 6,700 feet above sea level. Utah comes in third at 6,100 feet, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho each break 5,000 feet, and the rest of the field is hardly worth mentioning. At 3,400 feet, Montana is only half as high as Colorado, and Alaska, despite having the highest peaks, is even further down the list at 1,900 feet. Colorado has more fourteeners than all the other U.S. states combined, and more than all of Canada too. Colorado’s lowest point (3,315 feet along the Kansas border) is higher than the highest point in twenty other states. Rivers begin here and flow away to all the points of the compass. Colorado receives no rivers from another state (unless you count the Green River’s’ brief in and out from Utah).Wyoming’s Wind River Range is the only mountain in North America that supplies water to all three master streams of the American West: Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia rivers.

I spent my summers at my grandparents’ cabin in Estes Park, literally next door to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a view of Longs Peak across the valley and the giant rock beaver who, my granddad told me, was forever climbing toward the summit of the mountain. We awoke to mule deer peering in the windows and hummingbirds buzzing around the red-trimmed feeders; spent the days chasing chipmunks across the boulders of Deer Mountain and the nights listening to coyotes howling in the dark.

To the Cedar Falls legalists, if God’s word could come that way 10,000 years ago, there was no reason to believe it couldn’t come that way now. So when Vicki decided her family would follow Old Testament law and stop eating unclean meat like pork and oysters (“The Lord says, ‘Don’t eat it’—He knows it’s got trichonomas and isn’t good for your body,” Vicki wrote to a friend), no one in the group thought she’d come about the decision from anywhere but Scripture and His divine will. There would be anywhere from four to ten people at the Weavers’ house, sometimes as often as four nights a week. Randy led the Bible study most of the time, but everyone read chapters and commented on what they might mean. Vicki was clearly the scripturalist and scholar of the group. It was as if she had memorized the whole thing, from Genesis to Revelation, Acts to Zechariah. They read only the King James Version of the Bible, because Vicki said other translations weren’t divinely inspired and were pagan-influenced. By 1981, the Old Testament books were opening up for Randy and Vicki, not as outdated stories, but as the never-ending law of the Maker. He was opening their eyes to what was happening now, in the United States, just as Hal Lindsey had foretold. The forces of evil (the Soviet Union, the U.S. government, Jewish bankers) were ready to strike at any time against American people. From Ezekiel, they read: “Son of man [Christian Americans], set thy face against Gog [the grand conspiracy] … “Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company [their Bible study group] that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them. After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword [somewhere in the American West], and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains [the Rockies] of Israel [the United States], which have been always waste [the desolate mountains of Montana? Colorado?

By late January 2014, Tesla had completed the construction of a cross-country Supercharger corridor that would allow Model S drivers to get from Los Angeles to New York without having to spend a penny on energy. The electric highway took a northern route through Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois, before approaching New York from Delaware. The path it cut was similar to a trip taken by Musk and his brother, Kimbal, in a beat-up 1970s BMW 320i in 1994. Within days of the route’s completion, Tesla staged a cross-country rally to show that the Model S could easily handle long-distance driving, even in the dead of winter. Two hot-pepper-red Model S’s, driven by members of the Supercharging team, left Tesla’s Los Angeles–based design studio just after midnight on Thursday, January 30. Tesla planned to finish the trip at New York’s City Hall on the night of February 1, the day before Super Bowl XLVIII, which would take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the state line. Along the way, the cars would drive through some of the snowiest and most frigid places in the country, in one of the coldest weeks of the year. The trip took a little longer than expected. The rally encountered a wild snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains that temporarily closed the road over Vail Pass and then provided an icy entrance to Wyoming. Somewhere in South Dakota, one of the rally’s diesel support vans broke down, forcing its occupants to catch a flight from Sioux Falls to rejoin the rest of the crew in Chicago. And in Ohio, the cars powered through torrential rains as the fatigued crew pressed on for the final stretch. It was 7:30 A.M. on Sunday, February 2, when the Teslas rolled up to New York’s City Hall on a bright, mild morning. The 3,427-mile journey had taken 76 hours and 5 minutes—just over three days. The cars had spent a total of 15 hours and 57 seconds charging along the way,

Jenna Zulauf loves spending her free time both indoors working out and outdoors experiencing all that Colorado has to offer. Her favorite past time is hiking with her 3 German Shepherds. Jenna Zulauf has summited 14ers with her dogs right beside her, exploring nature's peace, calm and serenity in the beautiful Rocky Mountains.

Staring into her coffee cup, Grace wondered how this had happened. How had she gone from her wonderful, sparkling life to where she was now, sitting in a VFW-turned-diner in the shrinking town of Monroe, Colorado, and dreading her upcoming shift at a dog kennel? “What’s wrong?” No. Please, no. Grace pushed her coffee out of the way so her forehead could hit the counter with a thump. Why do you hate me, God? “Are you sad because Oliver’s evil twin cheated on Constance with Tatiana?” “Stop!” Sitting up abruptly, Grace covered her ears and glared at Hugh. He looked all amused and hot and cheerful sitting there on the stool next to hers—right next to hers—and that made her even crankier.

Colorado was not far behind. Rocky Mountain Klansmen kidnapped two prominent attorneys—one a Jew who defended bootleggers, the other a Catholic whose crime was his faith—then clubbed them nearly to death. They tried to force a Black family out of their home in Grand Junction, warning that if they did not leave, their lives would be in danger. But the violence did nothing to curb popularity. The Klan mayor of Denver, elected in 1923, named fellow members of the Invisible Empire as police chief and city attorney. One night alone, the Klan set seven crosses ablaze throughout Denver. They would soon be “the largest and most cohesive, most efficiently organized political force in the state of Colorado,” wrote the Denver Post.

The Rocky Mountain range in Cheyenne, Colorado, remained quiet and majestic on the surface, but deep within its belly was a hurricane of coordinated countermeasures.

I am looking forward to fully understanding what is occurring. Other than the fact that we are well over a century in my future—if it is MY future; in America, in an underground government facility of some sort near the Colorado Rocky Mountains, specifically Pikes Peak, so I assume the nearest city of any import to be Colorado Springs…I am afraid I have little grasp of your project.” ~Sherlock Holmes

In 2018 I went back to the mountains to become a wildland firefighter again. I hadn’t been in the field for three years, and since then I’d gotten used to training in nice gyms and living in comfort. Some might call it luxury. I was in a plush hotel room in Vegas when the 416 fire sparked and I got the call. What started as a 2,000-acre grass fire in the San Juan Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains was growing into a record breaking, 55,000-acre monster. I hung up and caught a prop plane to Grand Junction, loaded up in a U.S. Forest Service truck, and drove three hours to the outskirts of Durango, Colorado, where I suited up in my green Nomex pants and yellow, long-sleeved button down, my hard hat, field glasses, and gloves, and grabbed my super Pulaski—a wildland fire fighter’s most trusted weapon. I can dig for hours with that thing, and that’s what we do. We don’t spray water. We specialize in containment, and that means digging lines and clearing brush so there’s no fuel in the path of an inferno. We dig and run, run and dig, until every muscle is spent. Then we do it all over again.

The small town of Gunnison, Colorado, lies at the bottom of the valley carved by the Gunnison River into the Rocky Mountains. It is now crossed by the Colorado stretch of U.S. Highway 50, but in 1918, the town was mainly supplied by train and two at best mediocre roads. When the 1918–19 influenza pandemic reached Colorado as an unwelcome stowaway on a train carrying servicemen from Montana to Boulder, the town of Gunnison took decisive action. As the November 1, 1918, edition of the Gunnison News-Champion documents, a Dr. Rockefeller from the nearby town of Crested Butte was "given entire charge of both towns and county to enforce a quarantine against all the world". He instituted a strict reverse quarantine regime that almost entirely isolated Gunnison from the rest of the world. Gunnison became one of the few communities that largely escaped the ravages of the influenza pandemic, at least in the beginning – in an instructive example of the limited human patience for the social, psychological and economic disruption of quarantine, adherence eventually waned and the front page of the Gunnison News-Champion's March 14, 1919, issue reports that the influenza pandemic got to Gunnison, too. Nevertheless, Gunnison had a very lucky escape – of a population of over 6,900 (including the county), there were only a few cases and a single death.

December 21 Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. Ralph Waldo Emerson The warrior has to trust his instinct, even if it goes against what everyone else thinks is right. Warriors must be able to count on their own sense of right and wrong, and be able to choose the right course of action. This only comes with time. You have to develop confidence in your own intuition. Your intuition will not lead you in the wrong direction, but you do have to learn how to listen to it. A few years back my wife and I were both teaching school in a small school district in Missouri. We were not happy there and wanted to get back to the Rocky Mountains, but couldn’t find teaching positions for the both of us in the same area. The choice was for us to stay where we were or just pick up, pack a truck, and move back to Colorado without any jobs. Now this would seem like an obvious choice to most people – keep your job. But we decided to listen to our instinct instead and stepped out on a limb. Our instinct told us it was time to go, so we packed a truck and moved to Colorado with no job prospects. Everyone who knew us thought that this was a ridiculous decision, but we felt it was right. In the end, we both found great jobs and everything worked out for the best. We listened to that inner voice instead of all the outside voices and outside reasoning, even though what our intuition was telling us seemed to be the unwise move to make. Always trust your instinct, even when you can’t figure out the logic behind it. I trust my intuition and it always guides me right.

Now when these storms arise, we simply have one decision and that is how we respond to those storms. And not just how, but when we respond to these storms. In Colorado, they are world famous for the Rocky Mountains that cover the western side and the plains that cover the eastern side. Because of this, Colorado is one of the only places in the world that houses both buffalo and cows. And there is a fantastic lesson for each of us to learn about how each of these animals responds to storms. When the storm rolls in from Colorado, it usually comes from the west and heads toward the east. Now the cows are fantastic creatures, and they usually sense the storm and as it slowly begins to approach them, they turn and begin to run from the storm. But because they can’t outrun the storm, they begin to run with the storm—maximizing the time spent in the storm. As people, we tend to do the same thing in life. We spend so much time trying to avoid the inevitable changes, and we put ourselves in more difficult situations that last much longer than they should. Now the buffalo do something quite different. As the storm rolls in from the west and begins to head toward the east, the buffalo sense the storm rolling over the mountains and instead of running from the storm, they begin to charge toward the storm. Because they run directly at the storm, they end up running straight through it—minimizing the overall time spent in that storm. This is a great lesson for all of us because I promise you that one thing in life is certain and it is that storms will come. Now we can’t control how often they come, how bad they are, or when they come, but one thing is certain: that each and every one of us can control how we respond to these storms. So instead of being the cow and trying to outrun the storm, increasing your pain and frustration, from this moment forward, I challenge you to charge the storm. I challenge you to be the buffalo.

From above—though it would be decades, yet, before satellites and space travel would show the world this way—the Colorado River’s watershed looks like a ragged, many-veined leaf, its stem planted firmly in the Gulf of California. In a wetter climate it might be invisible, hidden by the canopies of trees and overhanging banks of flowers and ferns. But here, in the American Southwest, the river carves and folds the landscape around it as if water holds a weight not measured in ounces. Its headwaters begin in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, a jumbled stretch of the Rocky Mountains, where cold rivulets of snowmelt wake beneath ice each spring to surge into a thunderous rush and pour into the Green River. Jotter and her companions had floated a placid stretch of the Green, 120 miles through the red rock of Utah, where the river loops and doubles back like a dawdling tourist in no hurry to reach the next vista. Earlier that day, they had reached the confluence where the Green joined another tributary known, until not long before, as the Grand. It, too, draws its headwaters from Rocky Mountains west of the Continental Divide. The Grand was shorter than the Green, but it had won the affections of a Colorado congressman named Edward Taylor. In 1921 he successfully lobbied to rename the smaller tributary after its main channel: the Colorado River. “The Grand is the father and the Green the mother, and Colorado wants the name to follow the father,” Taylor said in his persuasive speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, adding as further evidence that the Grand was a much more treacherous river than the Green, killing anyone who tried to raft it.

I’m sweaty. I’m tired. And I stink in places I really shouldn’t be stinking.” I whine and shoot a glare to Dean, who’s sitting in the passenger seat looking sheepish. “What?” he exclaims with his hands raised. “I didn’t know we’d have fucking car trouble. Your car isn’t even a year old.” “I know!” I snap, hitting my hand on the wheel and growling in frustration. “Stupid old lady car!” I exclaim and push my head closer to the window for a breeze. “The frickin’ air conditioning isn’t even working anymore. Me and this car are officially in a fight.” “I think we all just need to remain calm,” Lynsey chirps from the back seat, leaning forward so her head comes between Dean’s and mine. “Because, as horrible as this trip was, after everything that’s happened between the three of us the past couple of years, I think this was really healing.” I close my eyes and shake my head, ruing the moment I agreed that a road trip to the Rocky Mountains to pick up this four-thousand-dollar carburetor from some hick who apparently didn’t know how to ‘mail things so they don’t get lost.’” Honestly! How are people who don’t use the mail a thing? Though, admittedly, when we got to the man’s mountain home, I realized that he was probably more familiar with the Pony Express. And I couldn’t be sure his wife wasn’t his cousin. But that’s me being judgmental. Still, though, it’s no wonder he wouldn’t let me PayPal him the money. I had to get an actual cashier’s check from a real bank. Then on our way back down the mountain, I got a flat tire. Dean, Lynsey, and I set about changing it together, thinking three heads could figure out how to put a spare tire on better than one. One minute, I’m snapping at Dean to hand me the tire iron, and the next minute, he’s asking me if I’m being a bitch because he told me he had feelings for me. Then Lynsey chimes in, hurt and dismayed that neither of us told her about our conversation at the bakery, and it was a mess. On top of all of that, my car wouldn’t start back up! It was a disaster. The three of us fighting with each other on the side of the road looked like a bad episode of Sister Wives: Colorado Edition. I should probably make more friends. “God, I hope this thing is legit,” Dean states, turning the carburetor over in his hands. “Put it down. You’re making me nervous,” I snap, eyeing him cautiously. We’re only five miles from Tire Depot, and they close in ten, so my nerves are freaking fried. “I just want to drop this thing off and forget this whole trip ever happened.” “No!” Lynsey exclaims. “Stick to the plan. This is your grand gesture! Your get out of jail free card.” “I don’t want a get out of jail free card,” I cry back. “The longer we spent on that hot highway trying to figure out what was wrong with my car, the more ridiculous this plan became in my head. I don’t want to buy Miles’s affection back. I want him to want me for me. Flaws and all.” “So what are you going to do?” Dean asks, and I feel his concerned eyes on mine. “I’m going to drop this expensive hunk of metal at the counter and leave. I’m not giving it to him naked or holding the thing above my head like John Cusack in Say Anything. I’ll drop it off at the front counter, and then we’ll go. End of story.” Lynsey’s voice pipes up from behind. “That sounds like the worst ending to a book I’ve ever heard.” “This isn’t a book!” I shriek. “This is my life, and it’s no wonder this plan has turned into such a mess. It has desperation stamped all over it. I just want to go home, eat some pizza, and cry a little, okay?” The car is dead silent as we enter Boulder until Dean’s voice pipes up. “Hey Kate, I know you’re a little emongry right now, but I really don’t think you should drive on this spare tire anymore. They’re only manufactured to drive for so many miles, you know.” I turn and glower over at him. He shrinks down into his seat a little bit.

I’m in a copse of ponderosa pine on the edge of an alpine meadow in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. A story emerges from the scrolling graph of the electronic sound probe. The tree is quiet through the morning, signaling an orderly and abundant flow of water from root to needle. If the previous afternoon brought rain, the quiet is prolonged. The tree itself makes this rainfall more likely. Resinous tree aromas drift to the sky, where each molecule of aroma serves as a focal point for the aggregation of water. Ponderosa, like balsam fir and ceibo, seeds clouds with its perfumes, making rain a little more likely. After a rainless day, the root’s morning beverage is brought by the soil community, a moistening without the help of rain. At night tree roots and soil fungi conspire to defy gravity and draw up water from the deeper layers of soil. By noon, the graph tracking ultrasound inflects upward. The soil has dried with the long day’s exposure to dry air and high-altitude sunshine. The species that survive, the gold resting in this alpine crucible, are those who can be miserly with water (with multiple adaptations like the ponderosa.

On July 1, everyone wakes up to the news that nineteen firefighters have been killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. The Granite Mountain Hotshots are one of the most storied and highly trained groups of firefighting professionals in the world, and yet a fast-growing fire started by lightning overran nineteen of its members. When they realized the fire was upon them, the firefighters deployed their safety shelters, but the shelters were not protective enough to withstand the intense heat of the blaze. The Yarnell Hill Fire has the highest death toll of any U.S. wildfire since the 1991 East Bay Hills fire killed twenty-five people. It is the sixth deadliest American wildfire and the deadliest wildfire ever in the state of Arizona. Starting today, the Colorado Rockies baseball team will wear 19 on all of their jerseys to honor the fallen firefighters.

Rocky Mountains in the distance. We were high up in the foothills, at least five hundred feet, and down below a valley spread out, filled with a tumbled collection of red mesas and boulders and spires of stone. It looked like some huge kid had been building a toy city with skyscraper-size blocks, and then decided to knock it over. “Where are we?” I wondered. “Colorado Springs,” a voice said behind us. “The Garden of the Gods.” Standing

Right so, I like girls. And I’ve liked ‘em all my life. I was a marine. I’ve shot a gun. I own five of them, guns that is. I watch the Nuggets, Avs, Broncos and Rockies. I’ve never in my life worn a skirt. I wear a sports bra because with these babies,” she circled her bosoms with a pointed finger before dropping her hand to the checkout desk, “I got no choice. God saw fit to grant me an A cup, no way. Since I’m a C, I’m fucked. I have never worn mascara. I do not own a blow dryer. And I get off on goin’ down on chicks. Now which one, you or me, has more in common with Chace Keaton?

By Charlie Hubacek release date June 30, 2014 John Randolph, left Missouri following a long and devastating drought the caused him to lose his farm. He had heard of gold just for the taking in Colorado. On his way, he nearly died traveling over the hot, dry high plains, but he was rescued and taken to a new town just beginning in the Rocky Mountain foothills. There, he found a new life as a lawman. This only presented to him new challenges as he was forced to deal with greedy gold miners and settlers also looking for a new life and the Ute Indians who had lived in the mountains for hundreds of years. "Your job is to write the most honest book you are capable of writing, persuade someone to publish it at whatever terms are attainable, and get that book on the library shelves. Let it find it's own level, while you go immediately to work on the next one. Rack your brains on how to make this one even better. All else is irrelevant.