Winter ~ A Memory of My Youth and Winters in Leadville, Colorado
/The headlines in today’s news are about weather. The news from CNN just hours ago is astounding as this news agency reports of about 200 million people in our country are under some sort of weather-related alert regarding winter storms. Also, the news agency reports that about 5 million people are without power, mostly in Texas, during freezing temperatures that are lower than the low temperature reported in Fairbanks, Alaska!
In Colorado this past week, we had freezing temperatures that even by Colorado standards were lower than the average. In fact new low temperatures were recorded. By the end of the day two days ago, the weather app my phone informed me that it was -15 F outside as I sat bundled up in front of my gas fireplace. Grateful, that I live in a place where we are prepared for such low temperatures, I began to reminisce about the days when I lived in Leadville, Colorado, as a teenager.
Leadville, Colorado, at two miles high, or 10,200 feet, is the highest incorporated city in the United States. According to one source on the internet, the average snowfall in Leadville is 127 inches a year. It also averages 310 days of sunshine a year. That sunshine is nice in the winter, but that doesn’t mean it heats the place up. While it is a is a beautiful place to live, it also is a challenging place to live because of the altitude, the snow, and the cold weather.
The time frame for this story of this memory is:
Winter of 1962 - 63.
The place:
Leadville, Colorado.
The setting:
mostly takes place in our home which was a reclaimed baggage and freight building that had been turned into housing for railroad employees.
Yes, we lived in building which once served an old train depot as baggage and storage area. Here is a photo the place, but it did not look like this when we lived there, thank heavens. It wasn’t a great looking place. It was a humble abode, but not quite this humble. In fact, this old building is now in a different location from where it stood when we lived in the building.
Once upon a time, this was my home sweet home
This is a photo of my youngest sister and I standing where our house once stood in the old rail yards of Leadville, Colorado.
Originally, once it no longer served as a baggage storage area, the building had served as housing for railroad employees. When we were set to arrive on the scene and make this place home, it was in very bad shape. My father was transferred to Leadville as an agent for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad in the spring of 1962. As part of the requirement for the job, and as a salary “benefit” we had to live in company housing. This old baggage building had a long ways to go before my father would move his family from the new home they occupied before his job transfer and promotion, so he went to work and gutted the place before he moved his family. He built new cabinets in the kitchen. My mother painstakingly painted all the walls and made curtains for the windows. Together, they installed new flooring and wall to wall carpeting in the bedrooms and living and dining room.. Despite all these improvements, it was a shock to us when we moved into a place without the modern conveniences that we had in our previous home.
When we actually moved to Leadville, we had to learn to adjust to a house heated by an old Stokermatic coal stove. There was no central heating in that old place. The coal that heated the house was railroad coal that was provided as part of the salary for my father's job. He was employed by The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. The company paid for our house and our coal. The agent was given these perks. One would not consider these as perks these days. The coal was delivered by the work crew from the railroad. It was stored in a coal shed behind the house.
The main part of the building was our living room, dining room, my parents' bedroom, and there was also a long narrow room on the left rear of this building that we used as a t.v. room and a place where my brother would stay when he was in town. The attached building at the left in this photo was the bedroom that my sister and I shared. There was a partition about two-thirds of the way into this room that provided an additional "room" that served as a bedroom for my youngest sister.
That first winter, we found out that this part of the room could not be used because the ice on the windows would build up half an inch thick! That rear portion of the house was the farthest from the stove, and I think it had absolutely no insulation. Mother would hang blankets across the large archway doorway (there was no door) to that part of the room to keep the cold from reaching where my sister and I slept. She moved my youngest sister to the “tv” room to sleep because it was warmer.
Attached to the rear of the house was a kitchen and bathroom which had not been part of the original part of the building. It was designed almost like a “lean to” structure. My youngest sister rememberd climbing snow drifts against that part of the house that reached the roof. That portion of the house was heated with a small propane stove.
We had left a brand new house in Pueblo, Colorado, when my father was promoted to this job in Leadville. At the time, I wondered how this house, and this job was a promotion. It seemed to me that we were going back in time, and, I guess in some ways we were.
Guess where the warmest place in the house was. You are right if you guessed that is was on top of that old coal stove or, if the fan came on, standing in front of it was great, but we were not allowed to do that because we needed the heat to circulate. The stove was located in the dining room which was right next to our bedroom.
Memories of Winter Mornings
We never went to bed dreaming of snow days where school might be called off during the winters when I lived in Leadville. Never. In 2012, there was quite a stir because there was a snow day called and school was cancelled in Leadville. Many said it was the first snow day ever called in Leadville.
On cold winter nights, my sis and I would turn on our electric blankets and try to stay warm. Our room was pretty cold, but we would stay quite toasty in our beds. Mornings came early when we would be awakened around 4:00 a.m. by the sound of a snowplow scraping and moving ice and snow off of State Highway 24 right outside our window. Soon the plow would move up close to the house to clear the small dirt road that ran in front our our house to the Standard Oil bulb plant which was right next door. Mr. Carson, my best friend’s dad, who was the distributor and owner of the plant, had to be able to make deliveries of propane and gasoline to his customers in Leadville, Frisco, Climax, and Breckenridge, no matter the weather. And, my father had to keep the freight trains running on time. For these reasons, we were plowed out early.
Sometimes when the early morning snow plows awakened me, I would actually get out of the warm bed and make my way to the window to see how much snow had fallen. Memories of those early mornings when the town was asleep under its thick blanket of snow are precious. I recall being mesmerized by thousands of silent fluffy flakes falling to the ground outside my window. Soon, chilled, but peaceful, I'd make my way back to bed.
When my mother would awake me for school, I had an early morning college-prep English class at 7:00 a.m., I would resist getting up until the last possible moment. Once up, I would run into the next room and stand next to the Stokermatic coal stove to get warm. My father would have been up early to get the coal into the stove so the house would be warm.
Before I made my quickly executed move from the bed to the furnace, I had gathered my clothes. These were placed on top of the furnace to heat up so I’d have warm clothes to put on. Believe me, that helped. Oh how I remember the shivering that simply getting dressed in the morning created.
My father would drive me to school on mornings when the snow was especially deep or the temperatures were especially cold, but that meant that I had to be up early so I could be ready when he left for work, otherwise, it is true, I had to walk the mile or so to school. The snow could be up to my knees at times in those days in Leadville, and, as my dad would say, “I have the picture to prove it.”
That picture showing a moment in time in my youth captures more than just a teenage girl with wind swept hair standing in snow nearly up to her derriere. It so many ways, it truly captures the core of who I am as person.
At My Core I Am A Colorado Mountain Girl
I am a proud Colorado native, a railroader’s daughter, a mountain girl at heart. When we moved to Leadville, I devoured stories of the tough miners who believed their fortunes just might be buried in those hills. Beginning in 1860 the discovery of silver brought rough and tumble men to Leadville hoping to strike it rich. They were tough men and so were the women who came with them.
Fortunes were made, and fortunes we lost in this place. I loved the stories of Baby Doe Tabor hanging on the Matchless and Molly Brown surviving the sinking of the Titanic.
The gifts of that season of my life
Those stores about the history of the area and about men and women who lived that history were woven into the fabric of how I began to see myself as a Colorado girl. The stories informed me in times when it took fortitude to move forward. Yes, I have often relied on the grit I learned from others and from the experience I also had while living in a climate that is less than hospitable.
In the photo above, I see a young woman with a smile on her face, happy to be in her element, and happy in the elements of her environment. I remember the optimism of that time in my life, but I also knew, based on the challenges of living in a harsh environment, that optimism and grit would not be enough to bring about the future I hoped to have. A successful future would also mean that I would have to bring passion for my goals in order to accomplish the dreams of my future. I would also need perseverance. It would mean that I would need to plan to deal with days when the world out there was cold and unwelcoming. It would mean that I would have to plan for the unexpected and to bring a shovel because at some point, I just might have to dig myself out in order to go down the path I chose.
The ability to acclimate is a powerful gift in life. My parents gave me the gift of learning how to adapt and acclimatize when they moved me kicking and screaming just before my senior year in high school to Leadville. Did you know that the body, actually produces more blood cells in high altitude? Breathing rarified air, my body was transforming itself to adjust. I learned to adapt to living a new place that seemed so foreign to anything I had ever experienced before. I also learned to embrace change and the unexpected transformation it brings to the body, the mind, and to the living of life itself.
The body adjusts to rarified air in time. This served as a reminder to me that I could adapt, acclimate, and adjust whenever I encountered new experiences in life that seemed to being taking the oxygen out of me due to the environment in which I might find myself that was less than ideal. Embracing such changes brings growth and depth to life and to the soul. One learns what one is made of when one learns to live in tough environments.
Another gift of those winter days in Leadville was the gift of learning that there are some things in life which you just can’t control. The weather is chief among those factors in life over which one has no control. Acceptance, adjustment, and again, acclamation to the climate in any setting is key when learning to live life successfully.
Those days, those experiences, that setting, the history of it and the climate of it, shaped me in ways I never could have imagined at the time.
The Gift of Reflection and of Memory
Now, having lived three quarters of a century, I live a city at foothills of Colorado rather than in one of her high mountain hamlets. Now, living in the luxury of a well built home with central heating and a gas fireplace, when the cold wind blows, when the snow piles up outside my window, I remember those days of long ago. I bask in the memory of the warmth of the times and in the memory of the warmth of the home my parents created for us in what first appeared to be the harshest of settings. We often said those were the happiest times in our family’s life. In my memory, they were the happiest and best of times.
It was the last year I would ever live at home. When the next fall rolled around I was off to college and never returned to live at home again except for times when college was not in session.
I give thanks for the memories of that time and for the lessons I learned about life when I was just a young Colorado mountain girl. What a gift those years were!
