Where the Moose Roam

Joshua Hardin

North Park and Jackson County are virtually one and the same – an over 8,000-foot-high basin that forms the headquarters of the North Platte River, its waters
running downhill to its next-door neighbor, Wyoming.

Feeding the North Platte are the snows from the mountain ranges that surround North Park: Park and Sierra Madre to the west, Never Summer and Rabbit Ears to the south, and Medicine Bow to the east. Roughly in the middle of the basin is the town of Walden, seat of Jackson County, and ground zero for Colorado moose and not a lot of humans. The park’s population is 1,316; the county’s, 1,363. The county’s square mileage is 1,613. That equals about one person per square mile.

Moose arrived in North Park in 1978 when the then-Colorado Division of Wildlife (now Colorado Parks & Wildlife) transplanted 24 animals from Wyoming and Utah, hoping the moose would breed and thrive. The moose obliged and now number about 3,000 statewide, the healthiest herd in the country.

Like the moose, some people come to North Park from elsewhere, see the wide-open spaces, stay and thrive.

An Oklahoma millionaire who saw this isolated place envisioned regaining a treasure that America had lost: the Old West. He bought a 3,000-acre ranch on the eastern edge of the park and began building a 107,000-square-foot log cabin that 20 years later is still under construction. He purchased buildings in downtown Walden. He constructed the Western lodge-style River Rock Cafe and Antlers Inn in town, using logs he shipped from Canada, on the site where an outdated restaurant, the Coffee Pot, burned to the ground in an electrical fire in the early 2000s.

Another transplant to North Park, a California chef, arrived in his 50s and knew right away that he belonged in the park more than he had anywhere else. He later served a term as mayor of Walden.

A North Park native who grew up in rural Jackson County, riding her horse to a country school, never wants to leave, either. Her family moved away for a time to Meeker but returned to Walden. “This was my home, and I didn’t ever feel safe and secure anywhere else,” said Nadia “Tootie” Crowner.

Crowner calls North Park “God’s country” for its clean air, open spaces, sometimes friendly moose, and friendlier people. The moose make themselves at home in Walden. “A young bull sleeps at the courthouse, he sleeps in my driveway, he’s over on main street,” Crowner said.

Cowhands Scott McKay and John Guthrie III cross the North Platte River with McKay’s dog, Ty, in tow.
Carol M. Highsmith

Crowner – just call me Tootie, she says – meets on the sidewalk outside the River Rock Café on Walden’s main street with her longtime friend, the California transplant and former Walden Mayor James Carothers. He’s got a moose story, too.

“I walked out of my house, and coming around the corner of the garage, and … hello moose! He’s standing right there in the yard.”

The native Crowner and the transplant Carothers speak highly of Jim Moore, the Oklahoma millionaire. Moore helped Carothers with the restaurant he owned when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the economy. Moore provided tables and chairs for people to eat breakfast provided by the Lions Club cook wagon after the Coffee Pot burned down and while work began on the new cafe. Moore sponsors Walden’s Christmas celebration.

The historical anchor of Walden is a grandiose 1913 courthouse. The building seems like it belongs somewhere else. Maybe that’s because the Jackson County courthouse was designed by a Colorado architect who also designed a Front Range County courthouse in Greeley, pop. 109,323, and the City and County Building in Denver, pop. 711,463.

Walden’s population, around 600, is less than Silverton, county seat of the least populous county in Colorado, San Juan. That’s plenty of room for moose to roam. And that’s exactly what they do, anywhere they very well please. That’s what architect William Bowman’s design sketches of the Jackson County courthouse didn’t anticipate – moose lingering on the lawn surrounding his courthouse.

Ekho Wyatt, the county treasurer, said her co-worker, who preferred not to talk to a reporter, called in late for work one day because a moose was on her porch across the street. A moose had also attacked her miniature poodle.

Why do moose attack dogs? “They smell like wolves,” Wyatt said. Lately, wolves have begun attacking and killing cattle and dogs in North Park, home of Walden and Jackson County. “We can’t defend ourselves,” Wyatt said. “We can’t kill them.” Colorado law protects wolves.

Moose stroll casually among Walden humans from April to the middle of July.

Born in Fort Collins, Wyatt values North Park outdoor recreation. She and her husband camp three weekends a month in summer along various local creeks: Indian, Camp, but especially Sawmill. She catches Brook trout, “brookies,” she calls them, rolls them in flour or cornmeal, and fries them.

She intends to stay in Walden. “I just want to breathe,” she said. “Everything is perfect up here.”

Behind Wyatt’s office at the courthouse, on the same block, is the North Park Pioneer Museum, displaying some of what Walden has lost, a beloved movie theater, and those it remembers, an accomplished artist. The building itself has history. It began as a cabin in 1882, moved to Walden in 1961 and opened as a museum in 1963.

The Park theatre opened in 1946, with 350 seats – about half the current population of Walden – its first film The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The museum displays The Park’s two Western Electric Simplex E-7 movie projectors, massive devices, each weighing several hundred pounds. Two were required because the projectors ran 20-minute reels of film. Also in the museum is The Park’s popcorn machine.

On the walls of the museum are paintings by North Park artist Raphael Lillywhite, 1891-1958. Lillywhite painted scenes from Alaska, the Bering Strait and Guatemala for dioramas at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. His main interest was the American West. Lillywhite had worked in the Empire molybdenum mine for a time, and after saving his money, moved to Denver. There, Lillywhite met the owner of The Art Nook, who offered Lillywhite his North Park homestead, which became Lillywhite’s studio and homestead.

Like North Park moose, Lillywhite found his time in North Park productive, creating 423 paintings in six years.

Walden is named for the area’s first postmaster, Marcus Walden, in what was then Larimer County. Ranchers helped establish Walden as a commercial hub in 1890. Jackson County was formed out of a portion of Larimer in 1909. The next year, North Park had 165 farms with 31,000 cattle and 2,000 sheep.

Jackson County farms now number 131, averaging 2,301 acres, mainly pastureland for cattle.

Oil jack pumps around the park, many on Bureau of Land Management Land and some on private land, produce little oil these days, and other wells are orphaned, their equipment idle. Some wells, though, still produce enough natural gas to fuel a new industry: block-chain computing for bitcoin.

Crusoe Energy Systems of Denver uses Jackson County natural gas which cannot be flared – Colorado law prohibits it – and cannot reach market. The gas supplies the high energy demands of crypto mining and cloud computing. A single bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as an average American household does in 50 days. Crusoe installs a machine that makes 140 trillion calculations per second.

The Jackson County gas fuels generators that power the machines, all of it contained in a shed the size of a small cabin, within feet of the wells. Eighteen bitcoin sheds stand in Jackson County, and they’re changing more than just the landscape. Flaring consumes 93 percent of a well’s methane; Crusoe’s generators consume 99.8 percent. Flaring in Jackson County has been cut 75 percent. Still a concern among some, though, is that the generators emit carbon dioxide.

The 18 cabins and reduced gas flaring is overall good news for Crowner. She wants her sky and her seasons to be like those she remembers.

Crowner was born on April 15, 1944, in a Laramie, Wyo., hospital – Walden didn’t have one then but does operate a medical center now – and rode her horse to a country school at age 7 and 8 along with six other children, all riding their horses. Working on a ranch, she milked cows morning and night. Her school-principal mother closed the country schools and consolidated the students in Walden.

Crowner was mayor of Walden from 1992 to 1995. Her first act was to restore natural gas to the town after Kansas-Nebraska Energy suspended service. Crowner organized a campaign for town support of a 46-mile gas pipeline from Walden to Laramie, and won. She asked for variances from endangered species restrictions along the pipeline’s path, and won. The pipeline was built, which is why Walden households can heat their homes with natural gas.

North Park is known for short summers, about three months. Its annual Never Summer Rodeo, held at the Jackson County Fair Grounds in Walden, is named for the fact that locals have seen snow every month of the year.

Melanie Leaverton with North Park Chamber of Commerce remembers one winter when weather stranded 150 students from the University of Missouri-Columbia, heading for a sky weekend at Steamboat Springs, in Walden.

“Everybody in town banded together, bringing crockpots of food,” Leaverton said. North Park High School opened the gym, and the kids slept on wrestling mats. “I had seven college guys at my house, stuck on wrestling mats, here for three days, with their stinky socks.”

It takes a community effort to help a lot of people all at once in crisis. That’s true in a weather disaster, and it’s true in solving a cold case.

Kayla Rizor works dispatch in the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, which recently helped solve the identity of a 24-year-old man found dead along a U.S. Forest Service road in October 1987. Kayla remembers as a kid seeing a poster of the unidentified man in the Sheriff’s office.

With new technology available, such as DNA analysis, and new information, Kayla talked with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) about reopening the case. The not-yet-unidentified man’s body was exhumed from the Walden Cemetery, where he had been buried. Jackson County provided a backhoe that got things started, and Kayla and others from the Sheriff’s Office and CBI  used shovels to complete the job. They scanned the body with a metal detector and found a key clue to the man’s identity, provided by his family: a titanium rod in his right femur.

The family of Jerry Mikkelson of South Dakota finally had some answers. The family, Jackson County and Kayla had waited decades for those answers.

Most of the calls Kayla receives involve ranch accidents, usually someone who’s been bucked off a horse. Her uncle Jim and aunt Becky are Jackson County’s only two paramedics.

Traffic accidents with wildlife are common. A moose would sun on the road leading north from Walden and was hit by vehicles multiple times, surviving impact time and again. He met his end after destroying a young man’s new car and charging at the driver. Kayla’s dad was the responding deputy, and found the moose severely injured.

Of course, Kayla has her own moose story.