I came as a young man, refugee from the Plains.

Looking for higher ground.

Where the sun shines through the rain.

Where the mountain folks and the old cowpokes have found a ppeace of mind I guess loving Mother Nature makes you naturally kind.

Colorado everywhere I go I'm in your shadow And you're callin' to me Colorado the sun's melting the snow making the river flow to the sea.

Behold, I show you a mystery.

We shall not all sleep.

But we shall all be changed.

Ladies and gents, it's a great pleasure to be here with you tonight.

To tell you about the tallest state.

Colorado, which is higher than any other state.

And if it could be ironed out flat, it would also be the largest state, bigger than Texas or Alaska.

And some of you may have wondered how the gold rush started, how Colorado got us to start.

We're going to tell you here tonight.

It was all because of this bird, the golden eagle.

And if you look closely, you'll see the gold on top of its head there.

And the reason the golden eagle is golden is that it preys on little prairie dogs and ground squirrels and things that dig into the ground and find gold.

And those little varmints consume that gold.

Then the eagle eats those, and the gold rises to the crop of its cranium.

And that's how they found gold in Colorado.

A fellow from Georgia.... You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.

Alfred Packer is leading some miners in the late 19th century.

Down into the Lake City area in in Hinsdale County.

They've struck up a friendship.

They didn't know each other well.

They meet at a trading post, as I recall, and they get themselves into trouble in the wintertime.

San Juans are particularly treacherous mountains.

They still the mountains themselves still kill and supplies running low.

Don't know exactly what happens, but we get some deaths there.

Some are killed and there are evidences of cannibalism.

And Packer gets out of the area, gets to another camp and is in very good condition.

He's described as being looking well-fed.

We'll put it that way at a time when presumably he should have been in very bad condition physically.

He tells us that his companions have been killed and that they have killed each other.

He lays blame in certain places.

It goes for several years before he's actually arrested and tried for the crime.

There's basically two versions to the Alfred Packer story.

One is that he killed an ate five members of his party, and another is his story, which is someone else in his party killed and ate everyone else.

And then Packer killed that guy in self-defense.

There's been a lot of work done in the last several years on archeological digs down there and trying to find the which they did.

They found the bones, and I think they felt fairly conclusive that there had been indications of cannibalism and someone had been hastened to their death or to their untimely death.

But whether it's poor Alfred or not, I guess we'll never know.

All right.

My name is Trey Parker, and I'm a filmmaker in Colorado.

And I made a film, a musical about Alfred Packer.

He's just a quiet man, but his eyes can see right through.

If you take the story of Alfred Packer from his point of view, it's a perfect musical because it's about someone who's misunderstood, and it's about someone who's in the wrong place at the wrong time and and someone who becomes a victim of the circumstances.

But I'm sure this is the right way.

Were gonna die.

There's no escape.

I think my favorite number in the Packer the musical is Let's Build a Snowman.

Sometimes The world is black.

And tears run from your eyes.

And maybe we'll all get really sick.

And maybe well all die.

So.

Let's build a snowman.

We can make him our best friend.

We can name him AL We can name him George We can make him tall.

We can make him not so tall.

Snowman.

You'll have a happy face.

Happy smile.

Happy point of view If you build me a snowman, I'll build one for you So let's build a snowman.

We can make you more best friend.

We can name him Bob.

Or we can name him Beowulf.

We can make him tall.

We can make him not so tall.

The men are lost in the snow.

It's waist deep.

And there's this guy that just cannot be shut down.

No matter how bad things get.

He's.

He's still happy.

And so, you know, and he.

And then finally, he's so optimistic that he makes the other members of the party so angry, they end up shooting him in the head while he's singing it.

But the guy dies happily, the guy dies singing a song.

And I think that's great.

I actually, I don't know how that CU involvement with Alfred Packer got started.

Most students who come to the university, especially from out of state, and they see that the Umkc is is the Alfred Packer Grill and that there's Alfred Packer Day.

And then they all they learn about Alfred Packer.

Oh, he was a cannibal.

No matter what you believe, it's it's a celebration and a piece of Colorado history.

And for that reason, I think it's really cool.

Who who asked about the snow snakes?

Have any of you seen the snow snakes?

The snow snakes?

You hardly ever see them because they're white and they're traveling on snow.

But you do see their tracks.

And whenever you see two tracks together, they often travel in pairs.

Noah.

Noah taught them how to do this on the earth.

They travel in pairs.

There's a lot of species do that.

And some people mistake them for skis They think they're ski tracks.

But you can tell because if you follow them into a tree like that, skiers will nearly always, nearly, always will go to one side.

But with The snow snakes, They'll just split it between them, you know, because they want the snow.

Snakes went a little bit of separation between them.

So is this all?

Is this all perfectly clear?

Oh, yeah.

Land is immortal, for it harbors the mysteries of creation.

You hear stories since the dunes are composed of sand, of course.

And they shift all the time.

There are stories of wagon trains that get get buried, and even tales of herds of sheep that the shepherds were trying to get across the passes in the early spring one year, and the winds came up in a terrible dust storm and buried the whole herd of sheep.

I know I talked to a guy a few years ago.

They said, there's a buried in bus down by the picnic area, but I've never found any of this stuff, so we just have to rely on hearsay.

You get all kinds of stories.

Some people say they're mine tailings from UFOs from 10,000 years ago.

Or.

Or the world's largest cat box.

Since this is such a fun place that it triggers the imagination and people come up with all kinds of their own stories.

Some of the more common legends we have about the dunes deal with the stories of the local horses that got away from the ranches and lived out on the dunes for so long that their hooves became webbed, and they became web footed horses of the great sand dunes.

And these horses were so proficient in climbing dunes that they could just zoom over a dune, and with a regular horse that shod, couldn't, couldn't catch them.

Talk of mysteries.

Think of our life in nature daily to be shown matter to come in contact with it.

Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, the solid earth, the actual world, the common sense.

Contact, contact.

Who are we?

Where are we?

The earliest people at Mesa Verde were people that we call the archaic culture.

The people that we are interested in are what we call the Ancestral Pueblo people to Yute people, Mesa Verde, we call them those inhabitants of Mesa Verde that lived at that time.

We call them Mookie.

But archeologists and anthropologists, you know, they started calling them Anasazi.

So, you know, getting that name from the Navajo people and saying that these are the ancient people.

Yeah, they are ancient people.

But if you translate that word a little bit farther, it means the ancient enemy, you know, that's what it means.

My grandfather and my grandmother, they speak of the people that came from this part of the area, that there were people, a smaller people that lived in this area.

And they say that they eventually, you know, they disappeared or they went somewhere.

There are two long held theories about why southwestern Colorado was abandoned around A.D.

1300, and these theories relate to, first, the possibility of warfare and second, climatic trouble, particularly a long drought.

There may have been overuse of the land from farming for several hundred years.

They may have depleted some of their timber supply using the trees for not only for construction purposes, but also to build fires, to keep warm, to cook their food, any of the daily tasks.

And there may have been a cooling off period which could have shortened the growing season.

There may have even been outside influences we're not really sure.

Archeologists have found in the last few years several cases in which communities were raided and the folks were consumed as far as the Anasazi being eaten up or anything like that.

We don't have any evidence of that.

There were cannibalistic raids.

I don't believe there's any evidence for cannibalism being a way of life, but it happened to these people.

When you think about the depletion of resources and your food supply, your water supply, when you have that as a problem, which is a problem in other areas of the world today, then you may have more conflict.

But it doesn't mean know that they were eaten by anyone or that anyone literally wiped them out.

When you have a mystery and you don't know, it's something that not only you don't know, but nobody else does.

These people had no written language.

We don't have information about why they moved here in the beginning, why they left here, how big their families were, what they were doing here, why they chose to live here in Mesa Verde.

So yes, there's a lot of mystery.

And also the concept of mystery is simply something that people enjoy in general, and they like to cling to that.

This, this poor jackrabbit was out there in eastern Colorado and could not find another jackrabbit anywhere on the high plains of Colorado.

And so this jackrabbit, it was a bold little rabbit, if I must say.

So.

It saw those antelope see it?

See that antelope right there?

And during a lightning storm in the middle of the night, about midnight, no one's sure the jackalope was born.

And that was the beginning of a species here.

Fortunately, it was twins.

A male and a female jackalope.

Yeah.

And they proliferated.

To this day, if you run hard enough, you can catch those critters and mount them.

Have any of you ever seen them?

History shows that there were quite a few tunnels around the city.

It's believed that there was a tunnel from the Brown Palace to the Capitol building, which is probably about eight blocks away, and there was a tunnel coming down 17th Street that supposedly could handle a carriage and deliver people to their hotels along the way.

And there's tales of Teddy Roosevelt using that tunnel when he was coming to town and that sort of thing.

And so it's a fact that we had tunnels in Denver, and I don't think it's unusual whatsoever.

But for myself, I'd love to explore every tunnel in Denver.

My name is Peter Abbey.

I'm the managing director of the Grand Palace Hotel here in Denver.

There's a lot of history about the hotel.

There is a lot of rumors and unsubstantiated stories.

One of the ones that is very much in a lot of people's minds and has some sort of a raunchy connotation, and that is the tunnel that connected the Brown Palace Hotel with another building, which at one time was a house of repute.

And if it was considered really private, I'm sure if prominent people were coming over from the brown, that their privacy was respected.

And I think there was a lot of that sort of chivalry.

I think I'm a little bit the same way as some of those people that do not point the fingers at anybody, I do.

I've heard some rumors of who supposedly has used it.

I have asked some of those people, and they had some sort of a sheepish smile.

And we have no categorically proof that prostitution actually went on here.

But the information we do have surmises that that's was probably the case.

There's other mysteries connected with the building.

A woman was here on a tour one one time, and said that her father used to come down here in the 1930s to balance the roulette wheels.

Now, that's long after gambling was outlawed in Denver.

And I don't have any other verification but that.

But I don't think it's a totally unlikely story.

I think one of the reasons why the tunnel was closed up, I don't think it was quite kosher to be connected as a luxury hotel with that past.

And so it was thought it was best to kind of do away with it, close up, fill it in and be done with it.

Peter Abbey and I have talked several times about possibly opening the tunnel back up again.

And then of course, there's lots of legends about many other tunnels in Denver.

This is only one, but if we could actually resurrect it and allow people to actually see a cross, I think it would be a real treat.

So we'll cross our fingers and hope that that can happen someday.

Now the other the other critter you guys might want to hear about is the is the rakaboar.

If any of you familiar with that, I know a lot of you probably new to Colorado, but the rakaboar is a creature lives high up in the Rockies.

You only find it above timberline.

Mount Evans is a good place to go.

Look for this or Pike's Peak or Longs Peak, and it wanders around the mountains all day long, climbing the mountains.

And that's why the legs on the uphill side are shorter than the ones on the downhill.

Have you ever seen them?

The downhill legs are like that and the uphill are like that.

It wanders around the mountain all day long, looking for little things to eat up there.

And the the rakaboar is the reason for the ratchet owl, the ratchet owls allow the you find on the highest peaks, and it spends its whole day watching the rakaboar circle the peaks like that.

Well, anyway, this ratchet, owl would watch it and twist its neck around like that all day long.

And then towards the end of the day, at dusk, the ratchet owl has to unwind.

You guys have to unwind at the end of the day.

My name is Niko Hunt and we're at Eagle Plumes Trading Post in Allens Park, Colorado.

An old man, Colorado resident by the name of Charles Eagle Plume used to live here and this store was his life.

And he had a lot of nice antiques.

They're still here.

And one of his favorite things was a clock that hangs in the kitchen.

And every Sunday he would come in and he would say, has someone wound the clock?

And every Sunday we would have to win the clock.

And one Sunday we forgot to wind it and he panicked.

And he said, why haven't you wound the clock?

And we said, we forgot Charles.

And he just went into a panic and we asked him why.

You know what, what's the big deal?

And he said, well, when that clock stops, I'll die.

If that clock stops, I'll die.

And we all said, oh, yeah, he's just telling another one of his tales and went on the clock and went on about business.

Charles got real sick, and he was in the nursing home in Estes Park and hadn't lived out here for a while.

But we had a busy day at the store.

We closed at 5:00, and we got word that he had passed away about 615, 620 that evening.

When we came in the next morning and this was on a Tuesday, I believe it was in the middle of the week, and we had just wound the clock, and sure enough, we walked in and the clock was stopped at 620.

So we all kind of got goosebumps.

But he's still around.

I feel him.

Some people hear him a lot of times he'll be running around upstairs, sometimes he'll move furniture upstairs.

And this is when more than one of us is here and we're not imagining things.

I'll be in the back room, working at my desk, and.

And I'll feel this.

You know, when someone walks by you and you can kind of feel a little bit of air and their smell or perfume or whatever.

I can smell Charles.

And he seems to be really interested in the computer because we put a computer.

And since he died, and when I work on the computer, he seems to be over my shoulder all the time because I can smell his Cologne.

But he'll he'll wander around.

He turns lights on in the middle of the night.

My husband and I live here now, and so sometimes we have to get up in the middle of the night and realize that a light is on, that we shut off three hours ago He plays jokes on us a lot, and we ring the clock on Sunday for sure.

Every Sunday we do.

We haven't let it stop.

We let it.

We let it be silent for a year after he died.

And then on his, on his the anniversary of his death a year ago, we started it again.

Now comes the mystery.

In March of 1893, Resurrection Day occurred here, not far from where I'm standing.

The resurrection had nothing to do with angels coming down from heaven to raise the dead.

It had more to do with gravediggers coming out here.

You see this area, which was then known in Denver as Mount Prospect, was a cemetery.

Now, what happened was that somebody had an idea that said, why don't we take this old ugly graveyard, this city cemetery that was described by the Denver Republican is so ugly that if any of the people buried below it had any artistic sense at all, they would just turn over in their graves and shame.

So in March, when they started digging up the graves, it is said that an old woman was out there who would say, go gently, go gently, or they shall return.

The thing that horrified people to most was one day there were a group of women and children out here witnessing the events, and they brought out an old coffin, and when they tried to bring it out of the grave, they tipped it and it fell over and out, spilled this body of a woman whose eyes were gone.

And her face, her face was drawn back into death, smile itself.

And her long black hair was now matted and moldy and mildewed.

The people of Denver finally thought enough was enough.

Something should be done.

But the grave robbers continued to do their things.

Or should I call them grave diggers?

And as they continued, the old woman's words came back to haunt them.

Go gently, go gently, or they shall return shortly after this place we call Cheesman Park became Congress Park.

People wandering through the area said that they saw things, things that kind of darted in and out of the bushes.

One man said something flew up out of a grave and went right through him.

He never came back, and other people who had built their houses in the area said that in their mirrors at night, apparitions would appear.

Look at them in the mirrors, and when they turned, there was no one there.

It is said that if you go through Cheesman Park at night, particularly when the moon is full, you might hear footsteps of the past following you, or you might hear the voices of those who once dwelled below the ground, reminding you, go gently, go gently, or we shall return.

There are many other tall tales of Colorado that could keep us here all night long.

If you have the time, we have the tall tales.

Now back to the airport.

You had.

You had a problem.