Wild times in Gothic mid-winter

By billy barr

I first came to Gothic, Colo., in May 1972 to work on the water quality of the East River. Like many people I decided to stay in Colorado, so I moved into a tent and was there for two months until a kind person offered me to stay in his mining claim shack (better than a tent as you could close the door, but not much more than that as an improvement — it was old and beaten down). I stayed there for almost two months, before returning to New Jersey to finish college and work in a factory to make enough money to return to Colorado. In late summer 1973 I moved back into that shack where I stayed for eight winters before building a house in 1980 on land I purchased from Virgil Spann and traded to Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) for land at their furthest boundary — right across the road from where the shack was.

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