State Rep. Tom Massey, a Republican from Poncha Springs who represents the better portions of our state under the decaying dome in Denver, plans to introduce a resolution next year to give Colorado an official summer sport.
Early in 2008, our General Assembly declared that skiing and snowboarding were Colorado’s official winter sports. Now Massey proposes that pack-burro racing be declared our official summer sport.
I’m in favor. So far as I know, pack-burro racing is the only organized competitive sport indigenous to Colorado, although its antiquity is often exaggerated in the process of romanticizing its origins.
Folklore has it that the sport originated with prospectors in the 19th century, accompanied by their faithful burros, racing to the county courthouse to record their claims.
Hal Walter of Custer County, a pack-burro racer of no small repute himself, has researched the origins of the sport. Hal writes that it began on July 30, 1949, as “the brainstorm of merchants in Fairplay who wanted to attract more tourists for the fourth annual ‘Gold Days’ celebration.”
Since Fairplay came up with the idea, it got to pick the course. The finish was the Prunes Memorial (which honors a local burro who lived to be 63 and got his name from his wrinkled skin), next to the Hand Hotel on Front Street. The race started in Leadville, not that far as the crow flies but on the other side of 13,170-foot Mosquito Pass, a rough old miners’ route once known as “the highway of frozen death.”
If you were organizing the race, you’d want the finish line in your town. People tend to depart right after watching the start, but hang around spending money while awaiting the finish.
Leadville made a deal with Fairplay to alternate start and finish for a few years, but eventually that fell apart. Now each town hosts its own race with a start and finish. The racers turn around at the summit of Mosquito Pass, where there’s a memorial to the Rev. John L. Dyer, the Methodist missionary who carried the mail over the mountains on skis 150 years ago.
Although other towns host burro races from time to time — Idaho Springs and Georgetown this year — the annual Triple Crown series consists of Fairplay, Leadville and Buena Vista (whose 13.5-mile race starts at 11 a.m. today).
The rules are simple. Each burro must bear a pack saddle and a load that includes a pick, shovel and gold pan. The lead rope can be no more than 15 feet long. You’re allowed to carry the burro, but the burro can’t carry you. Women have been competing since 1951, and one racer, Barb Dolan of Buena Vista, is in the Colorado Sportswomen Hall of Fame.
Pack-burro racing, although it attracts some crowds in mountain towns, has been a rather obscure sport. Perhaps making it official will provide it with some deserved attention.
That would give us official sports for the two main Rocky Mountain seasons (often known as “winter” and “relatives,” although in some counties they go by “drinking” and “fishing,” or “unemployment” and “construction”).
Springtime doesn’t happen in the Rockies, and autumn is gorgeous but often fleeting. Even so, we still have lesser intervals like Mud Season, Wind Season and Tick Season.
That leaves an opportunity for new official seasons as well as official sports for those new seasons, like kite-flying or arachnid collecting.
So there’s no reason to be concerned about all the recent dismal economic news. The origin of pack-burro racing shows that Coloradans are a resourceful people who can invent an engaging sport — at least when tourist dollars are involved.
Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
