Graham Roberts steers his company-owned off-road Ford truck, dirt caked behind the rear wheel wells, out of the way of 100-ton trucks hauling Trapper Mine coal on the hillside sloping eastward toward Craig. 

 Roberts stops on the left side of the road, following mine safety protocol. He’s pointing to the place downhill where Roberts and his father hunted years ago – an area where he shot his first deer as a boy. Like so many other Craig households at the time, he and his father hunted to put meat on the table.

Both his father and his grandfather helped build Trapper Mine on those hunting grounds. Roberts himself would work the mine all his adult life. And he might be one of the last of 130 Trapper Mine employees to leave when the mine closes, likely in 2028. “That’s going to leave a hole in the community,” Roberts said. 

Trapper Mine and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association’s Craig Station next door will become part of Craig’s history: a town that chooses to remember the Old West, a place where outlaws once rode hard toward the setting sun, toward Utah, to avoid the law in the 19th century. 

Side by side on Graham’s hill, the power station’s three smokestacks rise like totems to the coal economy next to Trapper Mine’s 7,000 acres. The mine’s black-as-night coal seams cut deep into the earth, their depth dwarfing machines with wheels taller than a man. The machines crawl up winding, steeply graded roads, steeper than any public road in Colorado, and out to the power station next door. The trucks will add their loads to a growing pile of coal on power station grounds, one slow, short roundtrip after another, delivering 9,800 tons a day.

The power plant and Trapper Mine were built to operate together; they were born conjoined, one connected to the other. Roberts’ job as Trapper Mine’s environmental supervisor ensures that in 20 years, all around the open pits and disturbed land at Trapper Mine, will be reclaimed acres that look as though they’ve never seen a shovel, hidden by vegetation, elk and antelope feasting on it. 

The mine has reclaimed 4,496 acres; another third is still active with mining. The available forage for wildlife on the reclaimed acres is three to five times what it was before mining, Roberts said, making it attractive to wildlife.

Elk greatly outnumber Moffat County’s human population: 303,190 to 13,327. That’s a fact that Craig shouts to the world; the town calls itself the “Elk Hunting Capital of the World.” Coal jobs may disappear, but elk will continue to bound through Moffat County. And hunters come from next door and all over the world to hunt down elk and antelope.

Scott Moore grew up in Craig, and like Roberts, he and his father hunted for meat. Moore started at age 10 with small game – grouse or rabbit. As he got older, Moore began hunting with bow and arrow, preferring proximity to his prey over the longer distance of rifle hunting. His kills were for both meat and trophy. Whereas Roberts later became a miner, Moore chose a different path. Taxidermy got his attention when his parents brought home an antelope – “a nice buck.”

“I begged them, told them, that I would do chores, whatever to have the antlers. So, they took me to the local taxidermy, and we got the hide tanned, and he helped me mount the antlers,” Moore said. 

When Moore shot his first buck at age 15, he offered to work at Mountain Man Taxidermy, on level land on the opposite side of town from Trapper Mine, in exchange for mounting the buck’s antlers. Six years later, in 1991, Moore took over the business. As it grew, he moved to one building, then another.

Mountain Man Taxidermy looks outside and in like an upscale art gallery you might find in Taos – the exterior’s clean lines, brown and tan siding, the business name in orange cursive. Inside, the voluminous display room tall enough for a giraffe displays Moore’s handiwork – animals he’s felled and those sent by clients from around the world. In a shop next to the display room, Moore turns elk, antelope, zebra, and giraffes – whatever game comes through the doors – into a work of art, each in a position unique to the animal.

An antelope on display, bent down to drink from a footprint, tells a Moffat County story. Moore hunted another antelope for a week, following it to the only waterhole within two miles. Moore saw him drinking rainwater out of a footprint. Several seasons later, after he shot an antelope, he positioned it in his workshop drinking from a footprint. He’s also mounted a customer’s zebra, its stripes and the angle of its neck oriented with the sweep of a large tusk – a work of art requiring a client’s high-ceiling living room.

“I have gotten addicted to the wow factor,” Moore said. “I love when people walk through the door, and their eyes adjust to the light, they see the zebra, or a giraffe, or the antelope drinking from a footprint, and the first word out of their mouth is ‘wow.’ ”

Paul Knowles wants a similar reaction to the collections he’s assembling and authenticating at the city-owned Museum of Northwest Colorado, a rigorous, Smithsonian-style museum in downtown Craig that aspires to separate fact from fiction. Located in the restored 100-year-old armory, the museum houses one of the largest cowboy gun, leather and spur collections. When Knowles moved far away from urban life to wide-open northwest Colorado, he became deeply fascinated with what he considers to be the richest, overlooked history in the American West.

Knowles earned the trust of descendants of the Bassett family, who became protective over their misreported history, specifically the accused cattle rustler and outlaw associate, Queen Ann Bassett. Knowles received from the Bassett family a marked-up copy of the book The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy & The Wild Bunch by Charles Kelly, long considered a bible of Old West history. It includes a chapter on Queen Ann Bassett. Ann’s sister Josie Bassett lived much of that history, and her remarks in her copy of The Outlaw Trail identify parts that she considered false.

“I was there; that’s not what happened,” Knowles quotes Josie’s inscription on many points. That includes the famed outlaw Butch Cassidy, whom many believe died in Bolivia, as portrayed in the 1969 Paul Newman and Robert Redford movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “He was not killed” in Bolivia, Josie wrote in her copy of The Outlaw Trail, Knowles said.

Knowles is also continually researching the provenance of a so-called Custer Colt, part of the museum’s Cowboy and Gunfighter Museum. Its 5126 serial number suggests it was held by an officer with the 7th Cavalry, which fell at Little Bighorn. But with further research, its authenticity has become less clear. “We now have to say, either we don’t know it is authentic, or we’ll let this one go,” Knowles said.

Older, Old West history is getting new attention in Craig. The local college, the two-year Colorado Northwestern Community College (CNCC), offers a course in paleontology and access to a unique repository of exceedingly rare dinosaur skin fossils. That collection began with a leisurely walk in Rangely, 92 miles southwest.

A couple on a walk with their Great Dane, Walter, in 2014 spotted fossil bones protruding from a cliff wall on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property. Eventually, a team from CNCC’s Field Museum recovered the bones, which included the fossilized skin impressions of what might be a new species. CNCC calls the dinosaur Walter.

Walter’s ribs, radius and other body parts are laid out behind a locked door at the Colorado Northwest Field Museum at the college. In a windowless room below ground, fossil fragments and large, fractured pieces clutter the room.  There’s a lot of Walter’s skin, bumpy to the touch. Some skin impressions appear stretched; why is anyone’s guess, but fossil repository manager Sue Mock’s got a theory. “Maybe he had a full meal when he met his demise,” Mock said. “Being a paleontologist is a lot like being a coroner, except all your stuff’s been left in the rain for 75 million years, and all your witnesses are dead.”

CNCC students on the paleontology track go on a two-week summer dig, into a bone bed larger than a football field near Rangely. Students learn geology and mapping skills as they explore the field filled with the fossils of large sauropod dinosaurs, carnivorous theropods and small dinosaurs. They prepare the bones they find in the repository for a presentation, learning museum protocols and data tracking, and Mock said, sometimes making a mess, so they learn to properly store and label the precious samples.

The students share a camaraderie with those in Craig who exercise care in digging deeper into Moffat County’s history.

There’s been talk about a passenger train that might someday run from Denver to Craig, bringing hunting, dinosaur and Old West tourism dollars. As coal power fades away, Tri-State is moving toward creating a New West energy center for the people of Craig. Tri-State in June bought Axial Basin Solar, a 145-megawatt project near the Colowyo Mine, 30 miles southwest of Craig – another mine that will likely close around the same time as Trapper. Tri-State has a long way to go to replace its power plant, which generates 1,427 megawatts – 10 times the solar project’s output.

Craig town fathers also look to an experiment in Idaho to fill Craig’s energy gap: a small, modular nuclear reactor. The Idaho project shut down in 2023 for lack of buyers of its energy, but Craig leaders think it could work in their community as the coal mines shut down 

Craig the coal town might become Craig, the new energy center for solar and nuclear, and Craig, the world center of dinosaur research. 

And then there’s what already is: Craig, home of the Smithsonian of the West; and Craig, the Taos of animal art, and Craig, the home of people who never stop digging.