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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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…