The YAK is a beloved Leadville and Lake County tradition, revived through the One Community Project to celebrate the stories, voices, and creative spirit that shape our community. The storytelling contest and community event, hosted April 25th, 2025, invited community members to share personal stories, poems, photography, art, and reflections that paint a rich and authentic portrait of who we are. Together, these stories help ground the future vision for Leadville and Lake County in the real hopes, challenges, and connections that define our community today.
“You know I am going to die.”
“I know Dad, I know.” This was part of a conversation close to the end we were all preparing for. His matter of fact statement reflected this generation born in the depression, coming of age during WWII and marrying in the post war period of hope and expansion. I’ve often thought these were people who did not complain; they got up and took care of what was needed that day no matter what.
When I stood up to the mic at his funeral reception three months later, I was standing in a crowded room at the National Mining Hall museum. The museum that my Father helped conceive of with his friends sitting at the Golden Burro for breakfast recognizing Leadville was the location and the former High School was the place. Like most things he focused on, the Museum came to pass.
My Dad was born here. Raised by people born in this community who lived and died here because mining was the magnet that brought everyone to this place and kept them in an orbit. It allowed a community to form and evolve over generations. It was a unifying identity of pride and purpose since survival was not guaranteed.
Sure, there were a few who got wealthy, but most got by. Got by even during the gold and silver bubbles that eventually burst. Meanwhile, this tiny place is an epicenter that generated global myths of the wild west. Most people, however, were like my Dad and our family, hard working people who showed up for their neighbors and friends who provided meals off the back porch when times were tough and news traveled through the milkman and delivery boys, walks downtown and visits to the court house.
A fabric that kept people alive, the best they could, and then carried their bodies to the cemetery even in the dead of winter when they had to wait for spring to find the ground once again. That unified field is what I was born into where people knew my Great Grandparents, Grandparents and parents. I was who I was because of who they were. I had a place and I belonged.
I stood in front of this group understanding that they knew who I was in this lineage, maybe for the last time. “I worked for your Dad” was a statement that only happened now because that person who had worked at Climax was over 70 years old. We were watching a generation pass on, very quickly, as they were all reaching their late 80s at the same time.
Here I stood and knew this museum existed because of his vision and footwork. He is not represented in this museum because of politics. Yet, there was no other location to celebrate the life of a man who loved this place passionately and the mining that informed his whole life. He would say, despite his global career that took him to Harvard and beyond, “I was just a dumb kid from Leadville.”
I held that in my body as I felt the baton being passed from his life to mine. I knew in that moment my purpose was to acknowledge and celebrate his life, but more importantly the history he represented for this community. A community now at a very different time. I held that baton and knew I had no idea what I was doing and wondered if that was how he felt when it happened to him.