Mike Smith
Mike Smith writes from Guffey, Colorado — population small, elevation 8,600, opinions field-verified. He has spent a career measuring things that have to hold: bridges, roadways, numbers, his own word. These days he and his partner of twenty-five years run Colorado Mountain Distillers, a bar, restaurant, and music venue where the whiskey is soon to be made on site and the conversation is unregulated. He serves his community when called and sometimes when not, writes about rivers, small towns, and the distance between being right and being believed, and maintains that most of what's wrong in the world could be fixed by people simply doing what they said they'd do. He is currently somewhere between Colorado and Montana with a truck, a camper, and a manuscript.
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Twenty-Two Dollars
Ida Etta Borland bought up half a mining district and ran the town's namesake out of his own claim
In October of 1928 a widow walked into the office of the Cripple Creek Times and Victor Record and bought three months of legal notice. She was sixty-four. Her…
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The Price of Idaville
A town gave up a woman's name to get an oil man's
There are about thirty of us in Guffey most of the year, and not one of us is named Guffey. They do turn up, though. Every so often somebody comes through with…
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The Empty Sky
A Bet on Another Season
Written in the truck with stops for sanity and soul, Taylor Park through Grand Junction, on toward Salt Lake and Idaho. Twenty-five years ago this morning, I wa…
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Twenty-Five Years Above Timberline
Twenty-five years ago this morning I was sitting on the side of a mountain above timberline, waiting on light. My uncle and I had walked out of camp in the pred…
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Dolly was a Doer!
Verse 1 She came down from the Smokies With the mountains in her voice, Born into a house where hope Was less a gift than choice. In a coat of many colors, Stit…
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One Year Home
The Best Chapter Came After
One year ago yesterday, we finished one of the biggest moves of our lives. We packed. We hauled. We sweated. We swore enough to make a sailor uncomfortable. And…
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The Tool Reveals
On artificial intelligence and the friction we removed
The Marine Corps doesn't build character; they reveal it. I am not a Marine, though I have known and admired many. I only borrow the line because it turns out t…
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Becoming Local: Notes from Guffey, Colorado
I moved to a town of about a hundred people at eight thousand six hundred feet, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I had lived in small places. I had…
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The Currency of Being Local
Part Five
There is a joke people used to make in Colorado, especially the people that lived up in the rural mountain valleys. People in Colorado take a certain sense of s…
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The Water and the Well
Part Four
Our second day in town, I was standing on a porch talking with a neighbor. I was doing what a person does on his second day somewhere. Introducing myself. Expla…
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The Equilibrium
Part Three
There is a county in Colorado whose land use regulations, until recently, contained exactly one definition of a distillery. It described a fuel operation: the k…
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How You Tell Them Apart
Part Two
In the last piece I made an argument I still believe: that the weight you feel about a place you've lived a long time is not disappointment, it's information; a…
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The Burden of Discovery
Part One
Seventy-two degrees in the Gallatin canyon on a Saturday in August. Partly cloudy. The river running green on the left, the highway bending along with it, the f…