Did you know that today is actually a holiday here in Colorado? Happy Margaret Coel Day! So we thought, what better way to celebrate than to share this audio documentary our producer Paul Karolyi made last year featuring Coel and her work? She’s best known for her Wind River mystery novels, but before she got into fiction, she published a historical biography of Arapaho Chief Left Hand, who famously uttered these famous words about Boulder Valley: “People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty.” Or did he? This is a story about exactly that uncertainty, as well as the nature of storytelling itself and land acknowledgements.
This audio doc originally appeared on the podcast Range & Slope, where you can hear a couple of Paul’s other audio docs, like this one about Beau Jo’s so-called Colorado-style pizza or this one about Fort St. Vrain, Colorado’s first and still only nuclear power plant.