(music playing) - As we work to create a Colorado where everyone feels seen and heard, so many have trusted Rocky Mountain PBS as a place to share their voices and their stories.

- If I were to plan better, take my time, then maybe I could do it.

- From overcoming physical to emotional obstacles, the Coloradans you'll hear from now recently shared their perspectives on the world around them and what's most important to them.

This is Colorado Voices, your stories.

(music playing) - I just had so many reasons of why I couldn't accomplish something like that.

But it became something to work towards.

Hi, my name is Rachel Jones, and I just completed 1,000 laps on the Manitou Incline.

The Manitou Incline is a set of stairs made out of railroad ties that go up in elevation about 2,000 feet over the distance of just under a mile.

It's such an extreme hike.

It's such an extreme challenge.

People come from all over the world just to hike this trail.

My very first time doing the Manitou Incline, I went with two friends.

It was summer, middle of the day, had to be over 80 degrees, and we struggled up every single step.

It was brutal.

It was definitely one of the hardest physical challenges I've ever done.

I wanted so badly to get to the top, but I just felt like I couldn't.

But as I walked away, in my heart, I just felt like, if I were to go back, if I were to try again, if I were to plan better, take my time, then maybe I could do it.

And so, that's what I did.

I came back maybe about a week later, and I was just determined.

I had the whole day blocked off.

I had plenty of snacks, plenty of water, and I just had to make it.

It was probably one of the first times in my life that I overcame that voice in my head that was telling me that I couldn't do something.

And it was such a liberating feeling.

About 10 years ago, one of the regulars on the incline told me about a club that had just formed.

It was called the 500 Club.

Now, the 500 Club consists of people who do the incline 500 times within a year, within 365 days.

At that time, I could barely do the incline once.

So, the idea of doing it 500 times in a year--I ran home and I mapped it out.

It would take about 10 laps a week all year long to be able to do 500.

So, that then became this ultimate goal of, one day, I could accomplish this.

Where my life was at back then, I had a five-year-old son, single mom, living paycheck to paycheck, really struggling to get by.

I had a vehicle that would break down on the way to the grocery store.

So, the idea of being able to drive there daily--The physical ability to hike doubles that many times a week was something I physically couldn't do.

I just had so many reasons of why I couldn't accomplish something like that.

But it came became something to work towards.

The more I did it, the more empowering it was and the more limitations were lifted off of me.

Quitting wasn't an option.

I knew I could complete it.

And I think that's kind of been my motto from the very beginning, even that very first time that I made it to the top.

I told myself, "If I can just take one more step, then I can keep going."

In doing all of this, I got stronger, I got faster.

And the goal of 500, it suddenly became a lot more attainable.

And when I realized that not only was I going to finish the challenge, I was going to do it early.

At one point, I decided to just go all out and make this even crazier than it was.

And instead of counting towards 500, that I would start counting towards 1,000.

Let me just see if it's possible.

And at the time, I really didn't believe it was.

And that was part of the reason that I wanted to do that.

I wanted to pick a challenge that I truly believed was impossible for me, and figure out how to make it possible.

At that point, let's see, as I was going through September, I became tired.

My heart rate had increased, so my recovery wasn't as well.

I thought maybe I was just overdoing it.

It was crazy, but I was just hiking really long days, really hard.

And I thought maybe I was overdoing it and my body was rundown.

Come to find out at the end of September, I discovered that I was pregnant.

- It's a beautiful day on the mountain .

- Yeah, it is.

Yeah, it's gorgeous.

I picked a good day to come.

- Are you going to do a baby shower?

- Yeah.

- We want to support you, so invite us.

- I was excited, but also, I guess, scared just because throughout this last year, I have been training so consistently, and I have a training plan.

I know exactly how long each lap takes, how much food I need, how much water I need, how much sleep I need.

I just knew my body so well that I could predict the rest of my challenge.

I had every lap planned out.

Now, with this pregnancy, all that goes out the window.

Now I have no idea what symptoms I'm going to have, how my body is going to respond, if I can even do this.

So, I talked to my doctor.

I told her about the challenge.

She was fully on board with me continuing.

She said that since my body was already accustomed to hiking so heavily, I could continue.

I would just need to adjust for the pregnancy symptoms.

When I first discovered that I was pregnant, and still hiking, I sort of tapped in to my baby's energy for inspiration and for motivation.

Before she came along, I would go into my own head, I'd go into my own thoughts.

But once she joined me on the trail, I kind of started mentally tapping in to her energy and kind of asking her how she would feel about this.

Just really felt this connection and this support from her.

I feel like she has a lot of fiery energy.

And she wanted me to just keep going.

And that's sort of what I used to motivate me through this.

The incline being as challenging as it is, I always felt that the incline brought out the best version of me when I hiked it.

And that's one of the reasons that I loved it so much.

I've always said that there's a better version of you waiting at the top.

And that's the best reason to do it every single time.

As long as you can take one more step, you're not done.

You think you are because you're hurting and you're tired and you can't breathe, but if you just stop and gather yourself and just take one more step, you make progress.

It's kind of a foolproof system.

It's just take one more step.

I think out of this entire journey, I never got to a point where I couldn't do one more step.

You can always take one more.

- From the Rocky Mountains to the streets of Denver, a sense of community rings true for Coloradans, especially for these women who wanted to create a unique and welcoming space.

- Town Hall Collaborative, at its core, is a community space and a place that Lauren and I created to make space for particularly women and other underrepresented groups, which is our mission.

I'm Denise Day.

I am the co-founder and CEO of Town Hall Collaborative.

And that is where we are today.

Town Hall is located in the Santa Fe Art District.

We always knew that art and creativity was going to be a part of this space.

And being in the art district, of course, is just a great place to be for that.

Town Hall Collaborative was really born out of this desire and need to create space that was not just focused on a bar, but really focused on activism, having a place to gather either for fun or for hard conversations, whether it's race, sexuality, disability.

- My name is Lauren Beno.

And I am the co-founder of Town Hall Collaborative, and president.

- Lauren is actually the one who came up with the name, Town Hall.

It came from this place of wanting to take back this whole notion of not just politics, but of community.

That we, as a community and as a group of people, need to be involved.

And we wanted to make space for that.

- One-on-one, personal connections has really been the driver for Denise and I, and how we get the word out about Town Hall.

It's been a lot of community reaching out to us.

- "Can we host our event at your space?"

- We have been open since October, the beginning of October.

- And in those three months, we've had such a variety of events, everything from vendor markets, open mics, queer poetry, trivia, karaoke, a lot of music shows.

We had this really beautiful fundraiser here after the Club Q shooting.

- The reason why we wanted to create space for underrepresented communities is because, separately, for both Denise and I, we have always felt that way, of, "Hey, where is a space for us to go?"

- My oldest son is on the autism spectrum and has epilepsy, as well.

I have searched for years for spaces that just felt welcoming.

For me, it's that community.

But for a lot of people, it's other communities.

Women business owners are often not supported or have the financial support that others do.

The queer community, as soon as we opened our doors, the queer community showed up.

And we always said that we would be a space that was safe and inclusive.

Our bar, for example, and our coffee, is supported by women-owned spirits and women-owned wines and women-owned beer and women-owned coffee.

- The bar has never been the focus of this space.

It's really about bringing people together, about empowering and supporting women and other underrepresented groups.

- Personally, the sober community is incredibly important to both Lauren and I.

We both have people in our life that we love and adore who have chosen to be sober for various reasons.

When you build a cocktail menu, it's so easy to look at that menu and just remove the alcohol.

There are so many different combinations of flavors that are delicious without alcohol.

- Recognize where people are at and kind of meet them where they're at.

- And then kind of get out of the way.

- Whether you're a mom or you don't drink... - Communities are meant to gather and to challenge each other.

- It's really just to create space for those who might not have space.

- My ultimate dream for Town Hall is just that it stays around for a long time and that it continues to evolve the way the community needs it to.

- On the Western Slope, we met a social worker in Fruita who funds relief and self-care from their stressful job through the process of smelting iron.

- All right, here it is.

This is the-- - It's a bloom!

- It's a bloom?

- Yep.

- How do we pick that up on the stump?

- All right, grab--Mackenzie, you're over there.

You're grabbing the side.

[CROSSTALK] - We were so inclined to perceive self-care as a selfish act.

It is one of the most important things that we can do for the exact opposite reason of selfishness.

I work in the mental health, social work field.

And you will hear self-care more regularly, I think, in that field than anywhere else.

It is also where it is the most catch-22ed.

We talk about it all the time.

We encourage one another to be engaging with it as much as we can.

Your boss is telling you to engage in self-care... one day, and then, on your next day off, is calling you and asking you to come in.

Right now, what self-care has looked like for me has been actualizing a dream of mine that I've had since high school to take raw iron ore, in its rock form, and turn it into workable iron.

- How's it going?

- That's iron.

It's metal, is what I'm hitting.

I hiked up this mountain and collected a fair amount of ore from there.

I gathered mud.

The furnace has to be made from fine mud.

I gathered it from the Colorado River.

And I--You need charcoal as the heating element.

Instead of using a hard wood from the East Coast, which is sort of the standard charcoal, can I make it with a tree that's native?

And so, I used pinyon pine.

- And how hot is it inside?

You said, like, 900 degrees Celsius.

- That's what we're going for.

- I don't even know what that means.

[LAUGHTER] I was like, "900 degrees?"

- It's like 2,200, 2,300.

- We built a system using an old school squirrel cage fan, which is just a housing with some blades in it that spins.

Pulls air in, and then dumps it down a tube.

And we connected that to a bike, so you could sit, pedal the bike, and that would spin the fan and dump air into the furnace, which was an excuse to invite friends over and have people engaged, and turn it into an event as opposed to just me sitting there by myself in a chair, watching charcoal burn away, and hoping that it works out.

We exist within a capitalist system that is built around extracting as much from whatever the medium is, whether that is materials and resources or people.

And one of the challenges when you talk about self-care is that you're saying things that are in opposition to our cultural norms, which makes it really challenging to actually enact the thing you talk about when it comes to self-care.

It is still challenging for me, even though I'm trying to identify enacting self-care in right now in my life.

I'm constantly feeling guilty about it.

I'm constantly feeling like... Well, if I have the time to be taking care of myself, I have the time to be caring for others, which is what I should be doing.

And this year has been a lot of that.

And unfortunately, our system that focused on extraction, it is rare for someone to be able to carve out the time to enact self-care when the work they're doing is what allows them to function as a person.

And so, they never have time.

It's right there.

The child is in the back here.

- This is the birth.

[LAUGHTER] - Woo!

- I was not efficient at all.

It required a lot more energy.

It was a lot of things that made no sense other than that's how I wanted to do it.

And there wasn't anyone who said, "Well, you can't do it like that because it has to be done at this time, or it has to be done this way."

I was like, "Well, I just want to do it this way, so I'm going to."

And those are the things that are replenishing because I'm entirely getting to direct what it is I'm doing and why.

But thank you all so much for participating in this and sticking it out.

I've been dreaming of this for years.

- A mission to do what you love is something carried across Colorado.

For one man in Denver, a love for music and culture continues to stay strong 50 years after opening Aztlan Theater.

- This is the inside of the theater, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers played in 1987.

I don't know.

I walk in here, I said, "Geez, did I buy all this?

Did I get all this when I was... working a regular job?"

50 years ago is our anniversary.

My name is Tim Correa, and I'm the owner of the Aztlan Santa Fe Theater on 10th and Santa Fe Drive.

And we've been here since December of 1972.

And the word " Aztlan ," it's a name in Mexico, but it was used kind of a haven kind of a thing where Chicanos were free and freedom and no discrimination.

So, I said, "OK, I'll put Aztlan on the board.

Somos Aztlan , "we are Aztlan."

I was an activist since before I bought the theater.

It seemed like every time I saw it wrong, I wanted to make it right.

I don't know why, but that's how my brain perceived it.

I thought that buying the theater was one way of finding a job.

And I helped out the community quite a bit.

I lent the theater to a lot of causes, good individual causes and nonprofit causes.

We did a lot of community things.

One time, a guy came in and said his baby needed a new heart.

So, he asked me if I would help him out.

I said, "Yeah, let's do a fundraiser for you."

We did a fundraiser for him, and his baby got a new heart.

(music playing) These are all raves that promoters brought after we lost our booker.

They would have DJs, and they would get DJs from all over the world who were famous and had a big fan base.

And we would get 500, 600, 700 kids, young people, on the dance floor inside the theater.

These are all the original seats.

We do have these seats that we took off because we were doing a lot of raves back then.

We switched to raves.

And they kept telling me to take the seats off, and we did that.

And it ended up as our dance floor.

We went with the flow.

I think the main thing why it's stayed here, I think because it became a home.

We make people happy.

We like working with people.

We try to treat people as people, as human beings.

Yeah, my dad was a storyteller, too.

Well, I did a lot of things.

I did a lot of things.

Had a lot of adventures.

Who doesn't like adventures?

I would like to see it as sort of a legacy of mine, keeping it as an entertainment center.

And now that I see big developers coming in, more people are going to be here, I'd like to see them keep the entertainment center going here for the next people who buy the theater or take it over.

(music playing) - From the old to the new, the power of art in any form is clear for so many in our state.

In Colorado Springs, a new mural truly exemplifies the mission of a local Indigenous advocacy organization.

- I get a lot of questions about, "Why don't the faces have any details on them?

Why are there no eyes?

Are you going to paint eyes or noses on them?"

The style of artwork that I tend to do in a lot of my murals stems from what Plains Natives used to call, or what we refer to as ledger art.

And ledger art was something that was done historically on animal hides.

And it was before we had a written language.

We would document our stories.

We'd document happenings that would happen in our community through drawings.

And so, that's kind of the style that I started from.

And it's involved in a more contemporary way.

I use a lot of contemporary color palettes.

It's very much the kind of style I adapted based on that historical style of ledger art.

Danielle SeeWalker [INDISCERNIBLE], I'm Danielle SeeWalker.

I am from the Standing Rock Sioux Nation.

I am Hunkpapa Lakota.

But I currently reside in Denver, Colorado.

I've been here in Colorado Springs this past week working on this mural behind me for a really great organization that serves our Native community, called Haseya.

- Haseya is currently the only response for an urban Native survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking in the state of Colorado.

Having a mural in here representing Indigenous people, when people walk in the door, they immediately know this is a space for them.

This is an extension of a home kind of situation.

You know what you're going to get here.

Every single thing that we have hanging on the walls defines this as an Indigenous space, and that we're here to uplift and empower our community.

- A lot of the figures you'll see in the mural really represent the stories and really the resources and services that Haseya does for our community.

They have a men's program, so I put this warrior man behind me that's supporting a missing and murdered Indigenous relative woman, drumming as she's maybe singing or advocating for that.

To an elder hugging a child that could have been her.

A lot of the floral.

I love incorporating floral in a lot of my work.

And I wanted to do something very specific to Ojibwe floral because Monica is Ojibwe.

And so, I wanted to honor her and her work through the floral that you see throughout the mural.

On the very end, there's a woman kind of holding and cradling her baby, and that's just to kind of represent the healthiness of parenthood and that generational knowledge that we're trying to pass to our younger children.

- I think the style of painting, I enjoy it because it's today.

It's not a depiction of Indigenous people wearing buckskins and standing around a fire or doing something like that.

This is who we are and how we live.

- I use very contemporary color palettes, and I like to portray Native people as we are today.

We're still here.

We like to rock our hoodies or our baseball caps.

But we still might have a feather in our hair and wear our long hair.

I really wanted to show that, the two worlds, and bring it to a contemporary place.

- I don't know how she was able to take these really vague, very large statements and issues that we gave her and condense it down into this mural.

But she did it.

And it's perfect.

- I think because we are part of the same community and we work together, it just made it all the easier to collaborate.

- Thank you to all the people who've trusted us with their voices.

(music playing) For more Colorado Voices stories and episodes, visit www.rmpbs.org.

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