When your neighbor is the Rocky Mountains, it’s easy to suffer from peak envy.
But residents of Colorado’s rural eastern plains, a world away from the Vails and the Tellurides in every way except location, have their own hardscrabble pride.
Many plains folk see Denver as hell on earth. They know that the real country bumpkins are in Kansas and Nebraska. The air is fresh and clean, except near the feedlots and pigshit lagoons, that is, where it is the exact opposite of fresh and clean. Faith is important, as it is in most places where tornadoes frequent.
But this is also the heart and soul of Colorado agriculture. The state is tops in the production of proso millet (I don’t know what that is, either) and in the top five in terms of feed cattle, sheep, lettuce, and sunflowers. It follows that a truly Colorado dish would be sunflower-crusted lamb on a bed of lettuce and proso millet. (Okay, I looked it up. Proso millet, the only millet grown in the United States, is a grain that’s sold primarily as birdseed and health food.)
In recent years, the formerly thriving economy out here has taken a beating as industries evolved and consolidated. As the railroad snaked west in the 1800s, so did many jobs. Refrigerated railcars made it easy to bring Denver fruit from California, wiping out a considerable amount of agriculture. Today the population continues to trickle west onto the Front Range, which means more boarded-up houses and more piles of abandoned plastic junk.
But not all is lost: The real estate is affordable, alternative energy (most notably wind) is booming, and traffic is nonexistent. All things considered, it’s much easier to find peace and quiet out on the plains than it is on the peaks of the adjacent Rockies, which attract many more tourists—and are closer to the noisy passing airplanes to boot.
STATS & FACTS
Deer Trail claims to be the site of the first rodeo in the United States, held on July 4, 1869, but cowboys in Payson, Arizona, and Pecos, Texas, both claim the title, too. In the end, it depends what definition of “rodeo” you prefer.
Due to bad survey in 1867, the imaginary line marking where you leave southeastern Colorado for Kansas and Oklahoma wasn’t made official until 1990.
According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, the southern section of Colorado State Highway 101 in Bent County is the least busy highway in the state, driven by only 50 vehicles daily. In comparison, I-25 near downtown sees about 250,000.
SEE & HEAR
Read: Centennial, by James Michener, and Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
Listen: Anything by Fort Morgan’s favorite son, bandleader Glenn Miller and a country mixtape (preferably with artists with Colorado ties like Drag the River, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and John Denver)
Watch: The sunflowers grow
TO-DO CHECKLIST
Tip a cow
Race a tractor
Sit on a porch and do nothing
But residents of Colorado’s rural eastern plains, a world away from the Vails and the Tellurides in every way except location, have their own hardscrabble pride.
Many plains folk see Denver as hell on earth. They know that the real country bumpkins are in Kansas and Nebraska. The air is fresh and clean, except near the feedlots and pigshit lagoons, that is, where it is the exact opposite of fresh and clean. Faith is important, as it is in most places where tornadoes frequent.
But this is also the heart and soul of Colorado agriculture. The state is tops in the production of proso millet (I don’t know what that is, either) and in the top five in terms of feed cattle, sheep, lettuce, and sunflowers. It follows that a truly Colorado dish would be sunflower-crusted lamb on a bed of lettuce and proso millet. (Okay, I looked it up. Proso millet, the only millet grown in the United States, is a grain that’s sold primarily as birdseed and health food.)
In recent years, the formerly thriving economy out here has taken a beating as industries evolved and consolidated. As the railroad snaked west in the 1800s, so did many jobs. Refrigerated railcars made it easy to bring Denver fruit from California, wiping out a considerable amount of agriculture. Today the population continues to trickle west onto the Front Range, which means more boarded-up houses and more piles of abandoned plastic junk.
But not all is lost: The real estate is affordable, alternative energy (most notably wind) is booming, and traffic is nonexistent. All things considered, it’s much easier to find peace and quiet out on the plains than it is on the peaks of the adjacent Rockies, which attract many more tourists—and are closer to the noisy passing airplanes to boot.
STATS & FACTS
Deer Trail claims to be the site of the first rodeo in the United States, held on July 4, 1869, but cowboys in Payson, Arizona, and Pecos, Texas, both claim the title, too. In the end, it depends what definition of “rodeo” you prefer.
Due to bad survey in 1867, the imaginary line marking where you leave southeastern Colorado for Kansas and Oklahoma wasn’t made official until 1990.
According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, the southern section of Colorado State Highway 101 in Bent County is the least busy highway in the state, driven by only 50 vehicles daily. In comparison, I-25 near downtown sees about 250,000.
SEE & HEAR
Read: Centennial, by James Michener, and Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
Listen: Anything by Fort Morgan’s favorite son, bandleader Glenn Miller and a country mixtape (preferably with artists with Colorado ties like Drag the River, Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and John Denver)
Watch: The sunflowers grow
TO-DO CHECKLIST
Tip a cow
Race a tractor
Sit on a porch and do nothing