DOLORES – While many were ringing in the New Year, a team of volunteers in Dolores and Montezuma counties were engaged in an eight-day effort to save horses abandoned in the backcountry of southwest Colorado. The Dolores County Sheriff’s office received a call Jan. 1 from a remote subdivision near Groundhog Reservoir reporting that six […]
Maddy Butcher
Posted inOpinion, Opinion Columns
Opinion: “Getting out, getting along” should be our common environmental mantra
Two dogs, now gone, showed me how to consider the outdoors. Belle appreciated the landscape as a whole. She stopped, not just at the summit, but to tend to sounds and smells that called to her. On each journey, she paid attention to nuances of flora and fauna. Kip, meanwhile, focused narrowly on the path […]
Posted inOpinion, Write On, Colorado
For Colorado fence-sitters like me, the coronavirus reinforced a love for our equine companions
After a seven-mile ride in mud and snow, I bring the horses back to the paddock, toss them hay, and sit on the fence. Sitting on the fence is not a metaphor, it is what horse owners do as we watch, contemplate, and maybe – though it seems highly indulgent – cherish our time with […]
Posted inOpinion, Write On, Colorado
Somehow, by the grace of God, I weathered the most recent coronavirus storm
PANDEMIC STORM Someone sent me a playlist of dance songs this morning. By eight o’clock, with two cups of tea in me, I was dancing around my kitchen and living room, feeling relaxed and free of cares. My dogs watched. “Who is this woman?” It was different from that night last week when I hit […]
Posted inOpinion, Write On, Colorado
What my horse taught me about working through the difficulties of coronavirus
Late last year, I was riding my big project horse, Barry. (“Project” because we’ve got stuff to work on and “big” because he’s 16½ hands.) We’d moved up and down through the gaits and had had a lovely two-hour trail ride. Returning home, I grabbed a water bottle I’d left on a fence post at […]
Posted inOpinion, Write On, Colorado
Of whoopie pies and wilderness, and how isolation robbed me of my ability to focus
Here’s the thing about whoopie pies: They aren’t that good. Never were. The official Maine State Treat is a century-old tradition with a similar shelf life. Made mostly of sugar, flour, lard, and cocoa, they live somewhere between a cookie and a cake and are decidedly not pies. They are ubiquitous at the check-out counters […]
Posted inOpinion, Write On, Colorado
Even with orange juice, the coronavirus has turned my thought process into a baggage carousel
Outside my closed, local gym, there sits a box of oranges and lemons. The sign, scribbled in pen on a flap of the cardboard, says “Virus-free fruit. Help yourself.” There’s a plastic bag containing other plastic bags. Another message that says, “if you are taking the last of them, please throw away the box.” Do […]