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.
I’m going to be talking about two questions: “What roots you in this community? What are the things and people that connect you to this place?” These questions could honestly be one single question because people are rooted to their community because of the people or objects. They would be answering two questions at the same time in one paragraph. But you can also talk about how your family is the main reason why you’re rooted here, because they moved here for a job. But this is the best way I can respond to these questions in the following paragraphs by talking about the actual community and nothing about my family.
For starters, something that roots me to this community is what this community has become and how caring this community is to other people. This community has been very caring to both locals and tourists in this community because they want them to have a good experience in this community, so they’ll want to come back. The people in the community are also cared for because they give us things like groceries, things for our houses, and things to do in this community. But if we didn’t have these things, we would have to drive an hour away just to do something that isn’t in our community. This is what roots me to this community, and hopefully, everyone else in this community.
Some things that root me to this community are the places and their history that not many people know about. For example, we have a bunch of buildings that used to be barber shops or banks, and not everyone knows about any of this history. We have a weekend only about the past of our community, and not many people know it’s about our community’s past. The history of our community has never been told; some people don’t even know this community exists because this community is rarely talked about. If people knew about the community and all of its history, for example, the weekend for our community’s past is mainly about all of the mining history that we’ve had go on in the town. If we tell people about our history, then they would wanna know more about this community and would wanna come back to our community more often than once a year for a skiing weekend.
That is what roots me to this community because once you start to live in this community, it’s like everything roots you to it. You start to love the community so much that you can never stop talking about it, or you never want to leave. These questions were a little hard to talk about because they are practically the same question, just in different words, but I feel like I talked about the community pretty well. This community is by far the best community I’ve ever been in, especially with how small this community is; it’s very easy to make the community mad with how you talk badly about the community. Which tells us a lot about how the people love this community as much as anyone else would love their community.