Four decades later, you can still see the scar that the bulldozer plowed into the earth at what is now Mexican Cut Natural Area.
It’s the last vestige of what was almost a standoff, in 1965, between a scientist with a field-collection net and a bulldozer.
“That was me,” says Scottie Willey, who was among the research scientists spending their summers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, near Crested Butte.
In August 1965, she and her husband, Bob, also a biologist, persuaded The Nature Conservancy to buy about 430 acres of Mexican Cut land from miners and developers.
“We were celebrating at our cabin there in Gothic when a friend who was a geologist came by and asked if we knew there was a bulldozer headed up the road to Mexican Cut,” Scottie Willey recalled.
“We did not know that. We said, ‘Right now?!’ ”
She drove her truck toward Mexican Cut, following the bulldozer’s wide path. When she finally saw it, she turned off the ignition, hopped out of the truck, grabbed her net and raced toward the bulldozer.
“It was not a very big bulldozer, but it filled the entire road,” she said.
“I had to climb up the bank and go through the woods, and back down the bank to get in front of him.”
Confronting a giant earth-moving machine from that vantage point gave her pause. She remembers feeling young and foolish.
“I didn’t really know what to do,” she said.
“I didn’t want to stand in front for fear that he wouldn’t stop. So I planted my dip net there in the ground, and stepped back.”
The bulldozer plowed up to the net. Then it stopped. The driver beckoned to Willey, and she climbed over its big tread so she could talk to him.
He told her that a mining company had hired him to plow a road for exploratory operations. She explained that The Nature Conservancy now owned the land. The conversation, as she recalls it, was civil.
“He was very nice,” she said.
“He lifted up the blade, and he drove it, and me, up to the top of the road, where there’s an old cabin. He turned the bulldozer around and went back, while I stayed up there. That was the last I saw of him. I wish I could go back and tell him, ‘Thank you.’ ”
Claire Martin, The Denver Post
