burro racing

The following story is an excerpt from The Gazette.

IDAHO SPRINGS – Long ago before his long beard and long hair turned white, Bill Lee thought about what to be.

An oral storyteller, yes, because that, he felt, was a noble profession. That was needed in the ever- urbanizing West. But what to be?

“I decided on the mountain man,” said Lee, 67, reflecting in his log cabin, “because it was a really short-lived era in history.”

So he would go as the mountain man, fur coat and musket and all, to schools and libraries in towns up and down Interstate 70, to tell the kids about what used to happen in these mountains. And inevitably he would talk about the burro – Spanish for donkey – and he’d tell of the animal that was relied upon for toting supplies through the surrounding wilderness.

Toward the end, he would jump two centuries to the present. And he’d tell the kids about what they might decide to do with the burros one day:

Run with them.

Read the full Gazette article here.