Poudre River

I started listening to stories about the Poudre River and the people of the Poudre when I was a young boy.

My grandparents sat in the evenings and told stories at Sunnyside, riverside property they bought for $100 in 1929 in Poudre Park, a hamlet in the lower Poudre Canyon in the northern Colorado Rockies. There, they built a cabin.

Gary: pre-beard

Their neighbors would stop by at dusk and drink coffee. More stories were told.

Before long, I was collecting their stories in what I imagined as a special collections library in my mind.

Decades later, I filed away more stories during the years when the local water district tried unsuccessfully to dam the Poudre River.

Gary: Current

In 2000, I received a federal grant to write a history of the Cache la Poudre-North Park Scenic and Historic Byway, a 101-mile stretch of Colorado Highway 14 that starts in the east in Fort Collins, Colorado, and ends in the west in the high-mountain town of Walden. The byway goes along the Poudre River and through the Poudre Canyon–and right by Poudre Park, where we live at Sunnyside. 

Well, that’s my personal story, in the proverbial nutshell. Please feel free to contact me at poudrewolf@aol.com

Jan. 1, 2015