Listing Through Life

We’ve been disappointed with the pizza in Colorado. They understand the basic concept  —get a circular piece of dough and put stuff on it. But good pizza is much more than that. The sauce out here has no zestiness. It’s little more than tomato sauce. A coworker who used to live near New York and understands my complaint about Colorado pizza told me a story. A guy moved out here from the east and opened a place that made good pizza. The locals complained that the sauce was too spicy.

It was with a certain degree of skepticism that we tried Beau Jo’s Pizza. There are several locations, but we visited the one in Evergreen. The pizza came in “mountain” and “prairie,” depending on the thickness of the crust. We went with mountain, of course.

There is a lot of crust. It’s a bit greasy, but tasty. And the rest of the pizza wasn’t bad. It wasn’t up to Chicago standards, but we liked it.

We asked our waiter what made it Colorado-style. He didn’t know. He thought it might be the fact that you’re supposed to dip the huge chunk of end dough in honey. He was from Minnesota, and he thought this was weird. My wife tried it. She likes honey, and she thought it was weird. So skip the honey and just enjoy it for what it is — good pizza by Colorado standards.

I never intended to make a special trip to visit this museum dedicated to the life and career of Buffalo Bill Cody, but I knew it was there and figured I’d be in the neighborhood some day. That day turned out to be on our way home from RMNP. 

Cody requested to be buried on Lookout Mountain, above Denver. What you can look out on from the mountain, we don’t know because, when we arrived, it looked like this.

I won’t go into details about Buffalo Bill. The museum was much better than I’d expected. Most of the collection came from an associate named Johnny Baker. When Cody’s own son died, he semi-adopted Baker, teaching him how to ride and shoot. Baker later became a headliner in Buffalo Bill’s tent shows and, when Cody died, his chief memorialist.

Items belonging to Sitting Bull who toured with Buffalo Bill for a few months. The museum made a determined effort to appeal to the politically correct. Yes, Cody killed buffalo, but not THAT many. The species decline was due to the market hunters. Yes, Cody killed Indians, and even scalped one of them. But he fought for Indian rights, and they admired him and were happy to appear in his shows.

I sat on a plastic horse and tried to rope a plastic calf, but after three failed attempts, I settled for my horse’s plastic ear.

We could see if Buffalo Bill ever put on a show in our town. The woman at the front desk pushed this as a very cool and exciting thing to discover.

The grave was just a short walk behind the gift shop. The fog had cleared, but from the grave, the view was hidden by trees and a cell tower.

We woke up to a steady rain on Saturday morning. After breakfast in the hotel in Winter Park, we headed south. We could see high mountains covered with snow in the distance. As the road climbed, the rain turned to thick fog. At times, ghosts of nearby mountains would show through for a second, then disappear. We kept climbing and soon found ourselves above the clouds. It was spectacularly beautiful, and I’d like to take credit for knowing it was there. But I didn’t. I just took the shortest route from Winter Park to I-70. Turns out we were driving through Berthoud Pass, which tops out at 11,307 feet and is a major avalanche area.

The south side was clearer and drier, but no less spectacular. Unfortunately, a slow-moving pickup pulled off the shoulder in front of me and sprayed my windshield with muck the whole way down, so my photos aren’t great.