When Winifred Colby of Montrose fell ill while attending the last day of the Highgraders Holiday a few Sundays ago in Ouray, she was later most distraught about not being able to find out who won the events. She was helped to her car, she said, by Ouray resident, mining veteran and firefighter Steve Martinez and made her way home.
This week, she called me to get a copy of the paper with the results, insisting to pay for it.
Winifred — I'll use her first name because I can't imagine she's ever met a stranger — is 80 years old and told me that she can't remember what she had for breakfast, but she remembers long-ago details as crisply as a fall day.
Her father, Bud Wood, was a firefighter in Pueblo. He was also a war-time trainer, and one of his tasks was to teach Western Slope firefighters how to handle Japanese incendiary bombs.
"They flew them here on balloons, you know," Winifred told me.
No, I didn't know.