[Woman VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise, empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.

♪♪ [Josh VO] I've spent a good chunk of my life chasing the edges of maps.

Back roads, border towns, places where the air is thin, the people are few, and the nearest grocery store is a half-day haul, if you're lucky.

♪♪ Here in Colorado, Grand County is no different.

♪♪ An island in the Rockies, nested high in the mountains of the Continental Divide.

♪♪ [water rushing] I've tried to do it justice through the lens, with words, yet knowing full well they'll both fall short.

This is a place you experience.

You feel it.

A single view can shift completely with the hour, the season, the light, like a diamond that's sharp and multifaceted, impossible to hold all at once in the frame.

♪♪ There's a serenity here, resplendent beauty.

♪♪ Its poetry moving at glacial speed.

♪♪ Grand County's big, about the size of Delaware, but with barely 14,000 people spread over 1,800 square miles of high alpine terrain, it feels even bigger-- and emptier.

But this place has always drawn people in, tourists mostly.

For over a century, they've come chasing something: clean air, cold rivers, postcard views, some half-formed idea of the wild.

And like it or not, that's what keeps the lights on.

These towns-- Frazier, Granby, Grand Lake, Hot Sulfur Springs-- they're not rugged little outposts trying to go it alone.

They can't afford to be.

The mountains here don't separate them.

They stitch them together.

Geography may isolate them from the rest of the world, but within these borders, they're in it together.

Tourism is the lifeblood; shared roads, shared seasons, shared struggles.

When the crowds show up, everyone feels it.

When they don't, everyone feels that too.

This isn't just mountain living.

It's a long-running hustle in a beautiful, brutal setting.

And it works because these communities have figured out something a lot of places haven't: No one makes it out here alone.

♪♪ They say the place you're from shapes you.

Maybe it defines you.

I've always thought you can't really understand yourself until you understand where you come from.

I'm Josh with PBS Appalachia.

In this series, I'm going from town to town, exploring the places people still call home, their hometowns.

From Appalachia to the rest of the country, I've found we share more than we think.

But it's the details, the food, the voices, the pride and traditions, that make us different.

This isn't a story told from New York or LA.

It comes with roots embedded in Southwest Virginia, an often overlooked, misunderstood corner of the map.

That perspective matters because the character of America doesn't just live in its big cities.

It's the small towns, the back roads, the kitchens, and the bars where people gather.

That's the lens I bring to this journey because the character of America isn't written in headlines.

It's lived in neighborhoods, on porches, at kitchen tables.

And this season, we're pushing past borders into communities far from here, into new towns, new kitchens, new homes, searching for what home means here and everywhere.

If you really want to understand a place, you don't start with the brochures.

You find the people who've been here the longest.

The ones with dirt under their nails and stories that never made it into the guidebooks.

So I sat down with the former director of the Grand Lake Historical Society, a man whose family rolled into the area back in the 1890s, before the roads, before the crowds.

What drove them here?

-A homesteading.

-You know back then, they're probably coming through these mountains on wagons and stuff like that.

Wouldn't there be easier places [laughs] to get to homestead?

Was there something that made it attractive?

-It was 1862 Homestead Act that President Lincoln signed, saying, please, go West, you know.

Get out of the filth of back East and get away from the beginnings of the Civil War and stuff.

[Josh VO] Dave told me a story about one such family, the Harbisons, who came to the area and homesteaded on nearly 200 acres.

[Dave] So the two daughters came up and homesteaded here.

The daughters never married, but they were old enough.

Land ownership to women was regulated only by the Homestead Act.

Women couldn't own land on their own, except for the homestead.

And so these two women, Annie and Kitty Harbison, each homesteaded 160 acres side by side.

So they had a 320-acre ranch.

-Women in Grand County had a much different life than an urban woman of the same time period because it was homesteading, and it was ranching, and it was a hard lifestyle.

Everyone had to be involved.

There was no women's work versus men's work.

Everyone pitched in a hand.

They wore pants.

I know it's a novel idea for women in the late 1800s, but they did get to wear pants.

-They did?

Okay.

-It's a little hard to hay in a skirt.

I haven't tried it, but I would imagine it is.

-This place came to be in 1969.

There was the Just family who owned it before us.

And they actually were the owners of the Just homestead that is still here.

It was where people were building their lives, and they sold off, I think it was 10,000 acres, and 5,000 of those came to us.

We are standing where the Just family once stood.

-Yeah.

I guess they just wanted a horrible view.

-I know.

I know.

It is pretty rough, isn't it?

[Josh VO] Homesteading.

The word gets tossed around like it was all sunshine, grit, and noble struggle.

But the truth?

It was hard.

Lonely, brutal more often than not, and still they came.

The original tourists, in a way, wide-eyed dreamers heading West, looking for something they couldn't find back East.

Land, purpose, maybe just space to disappear.

They came to this vast jagged ocean of rock and silence, and they stayed.

Not just passing through, but putting down roots, building cabins and digging wells in a place that didn't exactly roll out the welcome mat.

What they built wasn't just shelter.

It was a legacy.

Something that could outlast them.

Something that said, "We were here."

-The mining era ended within nine years, and everybody moved on.

But a few people had discovered the Grand Lake area.

And as it is today, as it was with the Ute, who wandered in and out, it was tourism.

-So it's been tourism since-- -It's been tourism ever since the 1890s.

-[Dave] Yeah.

-This region has largely been based off of tourism, right?

I mean, for 100 years, people coming-- -Yeah.

And it's been the goal to get people here.

-Yeah.

-And now it's maybe not.

-[chuckles] Right.

That's that tension, right?

You need people here, but you start polluting the view with a ton of houses.

-I think sustainability's got to be key in, you know, in any tourist destination.

-Right.

-Tell somebody about your favorite fishing hole, and next thing you know, everybody's down there.

-Everybody's there, yeah.

-Granby, you know, it used to be called the dude ranch capital of America.

-Mm-hmm.

-They used to have world-famous lettuce ranches right up here on the mesas above here.

[Josh VO] Turns out lettuce put Granby, Colorado on the map for a while.

Not just any lettuce, world-famous stuff.

And yeah, that iceberg lettuce, the name didn't come from nowhere.

Back in the day, they'd cut massive blocks of ice straight from the river in winter, pack the trains full of it, and ship lettuce east across the country so folks staying in places like the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City could have a crisp salad in July.

Madness, ingenuity, call it what you want, but it worked.

They even dammed up the south branch of the Colorado River to float logs downriver to make shipping crates for the lettuce.

-So unlike most people, I came here for a job.

-Okay.

[soft chuckle] [Patrick] Most people come here to play.

They come here to ski, fish, hike, and maybe they stick around.

Like the joke is, "I came here for the winter, but I stayed for the summers."

I came here to get a job as a reporter at a little small local newspaper.

-[Josh] We want to really understand what makes a place tick and click and why is this place even here.

So we've talked with local historians and whatnot.

But I think we also want to ask questions that are like-- [tuts] that also bring out elements of maybe complicated stories.

-Right.

-Tell me something complicated about Granby.

-Well, Granby's gotten kind of a black eye, mainly because of the bulldozer rampage.

[Marvin VO] So here we are, and I am at peace with what I'm about to do.

I-- I have to be.

-The sheriff in Granby says that Marvin Heemeyer was behind the wheel during a 90-minute rampage in that fortified bulldozer.

[News Anchor] It started just after 3 o'clock on yesterday afternoon in the town of Granby.

That's about 50 miles northwest of Denver.

In all, between 10 and 15 buildings were damaged or destroyed, including the town hall, the library, and the newspaper building.

Fortunately, no one was hurt.

-[Marvin VO] People will say that, "Why did he do that?

He had such a good life.

He had a better life than me anyway."

Well, I think there's something you should learn here.

For as good as a man can be, also can he be as bad.

When you visit evil upon someone, be assured it will revisit you.

And that is what is happening.

-The general myth floating around online about the incident, which happened in June of 2004, is that somehow the town wronged this guy and treated him poorly and stabbed him in the back.

And that's the online-- prominent online narrative, and they've turned him into kind of this cultural anti-hero, the great American anti-hero.

I was a victim of the rampage and all that, and that's why I decided to write the book, was to say, "Well, this is what really happened."

And anybody that reads it with a clear mind will see that Marv, the guy that perpetrated it, was probably a little bit off his rocker.

He invented a conspiracy against him that didn't really exist.

But as a consequence people come through here and think, "Oh, this is the town that mistreated that guy.

And they treat all the newcomers poorly and all that."

And my experience has not been that way.

-Yeah, I mean, just the fact that in several of the conversations I've had, it seems going back as long as this place has almost been established, it was geared towards tourism and welcoming outsiders in, if you will.

[Patrick] You know, I've lived here for 45 years, and this town is actually quite welcoming to people, so.

-Is there any type of redemption that comes out of this story?

-Oh, yes.

Well, the redemption that's come out of it is that the community has rebuilt extremely well since the incident.

[Marvin VO] It is a good thing, because I think the community of Granby will be stronger.

I think that they will understand, after years, if they ever hear this tape, if they ever hear the truth.

-And also, for me, it was just an awareness that conspiracy thinking and imagining your own slights and grudges, especially against government, can really kind of take over people's thinking.

[Josh VO] Bulldozer rampages aside, most small towns turn to tourism when they're out of options, a survival move.

Build a gift shop, throw up some signage, hope the highway crowd stops long enough to leave a few bucks behind.

But Grand County, it's different.

This place wasn't just saved by tourism.

It was born from it.

Even before the roads, before the resorts, the Ute and Arapaho tribes roamed this land for the same reason tourists still do-- to get away, to breathe, to exist somewhere untouched.

Homesteading here was less about manifest destiny and more like an open invitation.

"Come West.

Take a risk, build a life out of nothing but rock, pine, and stubbornness."

And somehow, it worked.

Then came the dude ranches, Colorado's early answer to curated wilderness.

A chance to play cowboy for a weekend, sip whiskey by the fire, and ride out at sunrise like you were born in the saddle.

Rugged fantasy without the frostbite or debt.

For most, these places were exactly that, a beautiful place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Then there's places like Knight Ranch, now Arapaho Valley Ranch, where the history runs so deep part of it's literally underwater.

History that included an airstrip where Charles Lindbergh on his mail trips across the country would often stop and visit his friends at Knight Ranch, who were the primary funders of his Spirit of St.

Louis airplane.

You don't fake that kind of legacy.

You don't sell it on a postcard.

-All right.

So tell me a little bit about this place.

What is this place?

-We are Arapaho Valley Ranch, set in Grand County.

We are a full service campground as far as cabins, glamping tents, yurts, teepees, campsites, RV sites, everything from if you want luxury in a cabin and warm beds and everything like that, or if you want to freeze at night and camp and rough it, and a little bit in between.

-And you're currently sitting in Colorado's smallest bar, the Red Dog Saloon.

It's located inside of our main lodge, and our lodge was built in the 1880s, where the town of Monarch used to be.

They moved our lodge up here, and it's been placed here since about 1945.

-[Josh] All right.

The town of Monarch, is that presently underwater?

-Yes.

-Yes.

-[Josh] When the lake is really down, you can see remnants of the town.

[Josh VO] Before the water came, there were ranches here, pastures, a town called Monarch, small, rough, and mostly forgotten.

Now it lies buried beneath Lake Granby and the Shadow Mountain Lake, like a half-remembered dream.

Monarch, funny name for a place that didn't rule anything and now doesn't even exist except on old maps and the occasional weathered sign.

A fire took out the box mill.

The railroad followed.

That was it.

The town unraveled fast, swallowed up by economics, and then, quite literally, by water.

The Big Thompson Project brought irrigation, power and progress, whatever that means.

What it also brought was the end of Monarch, flooded it, erased it, all for the greater good, or so they say.

But not everything was lost.

Harry Dirks, out of Kansas City, salvaged what he could, dragged pieces of the old town to higher ground.

Some of Monarch's buildings still stand today tucked away on dude ranches like Arapaho Valley Ranch.

Ghosts with good views.

Now the lakes sit still and cold, man-made but ancient in their silence, watching, holding the memory of a town that never quite had its shot, a place that lived hard, died fast, and left behind nothing but stories and a name on the bottom of a lake.

[Jeremy] We've been a guest ranch for-- this will be our 106th year.

We started in 1919 with Smiley's.

We've only had-- this ranch has only ever seen five owners.

-In that stretch?

-In that time period.

-So it's a lot of heart and soul, a lot of passion.

Our current owners call themselves stewards.

-Okay.

-Because they're here to protect and preserve it for the next generation, take care of it for the next generation, and generations to come.

Guest ranching is something I think folks come to-- come to the great outdoors, the great American West to get a taste of outdoors.

What life is like out here, and experience it, if only for just a few days.

-[Josh] Right.

[Jeremy] Well, that's what I've always said.

You can take as many pictures as you want and as many as you can capture, but it never does it justice until you experience it in person.

[Josh] Yes.

♪♪ [water rushing] ♪♪ [Jeremy VO] That's what I love about guest ranches, is they're all so similar in what we do, how we do it, but yet so different and unique in how we-- you know, we all do horseback riding, fly fishing, and all the hiking and biking and all the different activities, but just the atmosphere and the vibe of each ranch, there's definitely a heart and soul to the ranch, which you start to sense and feel after a few days here-- -[Josh] Mm-hmm.

- that makes it so unique.

♪♪ ♪ Make me awake ♪ ♪ Because I can't be late ♪ ♪ Let somebody [indistinct] and go ♪ ♪ Then I can have my way ♪ ♪♪ -[Steve] It's a challenge because we live off tourism dollars, and we are not a tourism town.

That's our business.

We're a small-town community that lives and breathes each other.

There's 424 full-time residents in the town of Grand Lake.

It's one of those towns where everybody knows everybody.

You've got to kind of be ready that nobody-- everybody knows your business, too.

-Grand Lake and the Winter Park Frasier area are just quintessential tourist areas, but they're just very, very different.

Grand Lake has the National Park, and we have the ski resort.

And they do have a very different identity, but they're both tourist areas.

-I was curious if they were kind of siloed or if there is a sense of, I don't know, connectivity or anything?

-There really is.

It's rather cohesive.

-Yeah, looking out for each other.

-We really do.

-Our family's owned the ranch since 1977.

[Josh] It's pretty interesting.

So there's, what, like half a dozen of these dude or guest ranches in, I guess, Granby or the county?

[Jeremy] Yeah, so I think-- let's see, we have basically five of them in our-- in Grand County right now.

-[Josh] Okay.

-[Jeremy] At one time, it was probably the dude ranching capital of the world.

[chuckles] I mean, every ranch is very unique.

So some hold up to 150 guests.

Some take eight people for a remote, you know, moving cows all week type experience.

[Josh] Yeah.

[Jeremy] Ours is kind of in a sweet spot, around 50 to 55 guests.

And I'd say our main focus is families.

So we get, for most weeks, about half of the ranch are kids with their parents or grandparents, aunts of that wide variety.

But we focus on kids, kids programs, evening activities, all those things are focused around 6 to 12 and even younger.

-Yeah.

What's kind of like the most rewarding thing about this for you?

-I think probably the easiest thing is just entertaining people while they're on vacation.

[Josh] Yeah.

[Jeremy] And you're showing them a glimpse of your Western way of life.

[Josh VO] Not everyone comes to the Rockies chasing whiskey-soaked cowboy dreams.

Some are just looking for a clean bed, a hot meal, and a taste of the mountain life that won't break the bank.

The YMCA of the Rockies offers exactly that: part guest ranch, part summer camp, but all heart.

offering a more affordable way to get your boots dusty with accessible outdoor adventures rooted in history, community, and a deep respect for the land.

♪♪ -YMCA of the Rockies has been around since 1908.

It is a place where you can spend all your time outside.

You get reconnected to nature.

You reconnect with yourself.

It's the type of relaxing that has you doing things, but you feel so refreshed after all of it.

-Yeah.

-We exist to serve families and individuals who might never get to experience a place like this.

We do have these opportunities called respite stays for single families, families struggling with illness, military families, teachers, faith leaders.

You can actually nominate families who you believe would benefit from an opportunity like that.

We are mission-driven, we're a nonprofit, and we have that philanthropic side where we have a lot of donors who make it possible for those families.

It's the most special place in the world, I have to say.

[Josh] Out here, people tend to find themselves in two places-- out in the wild, or shoulder to shoulder with the folks who call it home.

Like when I met up with local distillers Barry and Jenna.

-We used to come vacation here as kids.

-Okay.

And when my parents were looking at places to retire, they fell in love with this town.

We've been coming for years, but to settle down.

And then unfortunately, I pulled them out of retirement.

[laughs] [Josh] So how do you make that leap from chemist to, "I want to make whiskey and liquor"?

You know, like how do you-- is there a family history with that?

-Well, I was actually a postdoc working in a genetics lab-- -Okay.

-doing biofuel-type things and getting real disenfranchised with academia, realizing it wasn't the path I wanted to take.

[Josh] All right.

-Started to panic about what I was going to do with the rest of my life if I didn't stick with that route.

The first bar that I worked at to learn more of this side of things, in my interview, I told him I spent 10 years moving liquids from one container to another in precise amounts, and I thought I could transfer the skill.

[laughs] ♪♪ -[Jenna] If you come into our business and you're not used to drinking whiskey or you're not used to drinking gin, we wanted to make things that were a little more-- like almost soft on the palate.

We have options that are a little bit more modern and, again, more approachable to introduce different spirits to people that they normally wouldn't pick out on a menu.

-[Josh] I see.

-We lived in big cities all our lives.

-This is the epitome of small town America.

We can't go to the grocery store without at least one or two people coming up to us, say, "Hey, how's business this week?"

"How are the kids?"

So it's just a beautiful community and I can't imagine ever living anywhere else.

-The man that sold Jennifer and I this building, we'd sit out on the chair in the summertime watching the people go by.

And I'll leave you with this because he said, "You know, Steve, we get to sit here and watch these people's best day ever, and today's Tuesday for us."

[chuckles] -Just another Tuesday, right?

-Just another Tuesday.

-You can see them step out of the car and they're a little jittery, and their eyes, you can see a lot of whites, -Right.

[chuckles] -Whites of their eyes.

And it's just, "Whoa."

Their phone's in their hand and they are connected to the world and they are go, go, go all the time.

And they get here and they see horses.

They see trees and 8,500 acres.

And you can immediately see-- my goal is always within 24 to 48 hours where you can just see the body language shift.

And they forget their phone in the cabin maybe.

And they're having meaningful conversation at the dining table maybe.

And they're connecting with friends, family, other guests, and just, I think, disconnecting.

And that's, I think, what makes this place so special.

-Disconnecting and then reconnecting in a new way.

-Absolutely.

And it's impacting people in a meaningful way that they maybe are impacted... for weeks, months, years, the rest of their life, whatever it may be.

-We had a newspaper office on Main Street, and we had a news rack out front that was really nothing more than a wire rack with a metal tube in it.

This was back when we sold the newspapers.

And it wasn't locked.

It was just attached, just hanging off of a wire.

And in seven years, no one ever stole, took a dime, a quarter, whatever.

Nobody stole the papers or the rack.

It just sat there, right there in public.

Maybe would probably have $10 worth of quarters in it at any given time.

-Yeah.

-Never once was it touched.

-Almost five years ago, we had a tremendous fire come through.

It was called the East Troublesome Fire.

-[Josh] Okay.

-[Dave] It turned out to be the second largest fire in Colorado's written history.

It burned over 206,000 acres.

It came close to the town of Granby.

It turned and moved north.

Came very close to the town of Grand Lake.

The ridges behind me are burned up from the East Troublesome Fire.

I lost my home, and I lost my grandmother's cabin in that fire.

-Wow.

-After the fire... I lost my house.

But I didn't lose my home.

My home is Grand Lake.

[Josh VO] In our short time here, Grand County revealed more than just mountain vistas.

What we found was story, layered, weathered and deep.

This place has a memory, a muscle.

It's been forged by fire and flood, carved by hardship and shaped by the kind of resilience you can't fake.

There's a hum here, a low, constant thrum beneath it all.

Maybe it's the same energy that lifted the Rockies from the earth, the same pull that draws in the rebels, the misfits, and the ones too strange or too strong to settle anywhere else.

This final chapter is about that spirit, reinvention, survival and the kind of grit it takes to stay when everything around you says go.

Okay.

♪♪ [Woman VO] Nestled in the heart of Appalachia, the University of Virginia's College at Wise is where students experience unique regional culture and the great outdoors.

UVA Wise, empowering students to learn and lead in their communities and the world.