Dear Colorado
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This land is our land. Photo: Dustin Bradford/Getty Images
You live in America's imagination.
- Your Rocky Mountains do much of the work — but so does your open sky, the frontier myth, the ski towns, the trailheads, the ranch gates, the breweries, the tech hubs and everything else that promises a better life somewhere higher and farther west.
Why it matters: We're celebrating your 150th birthday this weekend. But statehood was never the beginning of your story.
- It's simply a milestone.
Flashback: You've been many things to many people. Before your 104,094 square miles became America's 38th state on Aug. 1, 1876, you'd been Indigenous homeland, Spanish claim, Mexican land, American territory and gold-rush destination.
- Your borders include land from the Louisiana Purchase.
- San Luis, your oldest town, was established in 1851.
You've long been the intersection of ambition. People came for your land and wealth, for work, health, escape and second chances.
- We still do.
The big picture: The question was never who gets to call themselves a Coloradan. It's what you demand of us once we do.
- You ask that we not confuse scenery with character.
Your mountains don't make us whole. Your Eastern Plains aren't empty. Your San Luis Valley isn't a footnote.
And your water isn't simply something to ski on, fish in, fight over or photograph. It's an obligation formed high above us but never outside our reach.
We built your towns and cities, mines and farms, companies and neighborhoods.
- We've changed the land, tested your communities and left hard histories we're still discovering.
At 150, this moment shouldn't be flattened into celebration or indictment. You're too vast, too historic; your people are too varied, too divided, too restless.
- You deserve a more thoughtful love: attention.
What's next: Some people reading this today will see you turn 200. Perhaps my descendants will mark 300.
By then, this weekend's anniversary will look less like a culmination than a waypoint.
- We'll become your history, too.
And you will go on.
The bottom line: What will the next fortune-seekers, escapists and dreamers who come to you say about those of us who are here today?
- That we admired the view?
Or did we understand the difference between being in Colorado and being of Colorado?