Colorado Trivia & Tidbits - Page 11

Looking for Colorado trivia? Try our list Colorado little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Colorado Springs student Akshay Buddiga, 13, earned second place in the 2004 Scripps National Spelling Bee in June, after successfully spelling words such as “amylaceous” and “lyophilize.” Nine million children participated in local spelling bees, with 265 making it to the national competition in Washington, D.C.

first appeared: 8/15/2004

Located between Cortez (pop. 7,977) and Towaoc (pop. 1,097), Yucca House National Monument protects an ancestral Puebloan site that was described by professor William Holmes as early as 1877, but has not yet been excavated. The cluster of mounds, one of which rises 20 feet above its foundation, covers a village that may have been occupied between 1100 and 1300.

first appeared: 8/8/2004

Designated a national monument in 1919, Yucca House was named after the American Indian terms for nearby Sleeping Ute Mountain, which was called a “mountain full of yucca” because of the yucca plants that grow on its slopes.

first appeared: 8/8/2004

Paleontologist James Jensen discovered fossils from one of the world’s longest dinosaurs—a supersaurus, meaning “high or ruling lizard”—in 1972 at Dry Mesa Quarry near Delta (pop. 6,400). The long-necked, plant-eating creature lived more than 145 million years ago, and grew to more than 120 feet long.

first appeared: 8/1/2004

State Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, of Ignacio (pop. 669), is reported to be the only American Indian presently serving in the U.S. Senate and also is one of 44 chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne tribe. A horse trainer, jewelry designer and athlete, Campbell also participated in the 1964 Olympic Games in Japan as a member of the U.S. Judo Team.

first appeared: 7/25/2004

The cliffs of the Pawnee Buttes, a pair of sandstone mounds near Grover (pop. 153) that rise some 250 feet above the surrounding prairie grasslands, provide nesting sites from March through June for raptors such as prairie falcons, hawks and golden eagles.

first appeared: 7/18/2004

The first intercollegiate football game west of the Mississippi River was played April 11, 1885, at the Colorado Springs Athletic Park, with Colorado College winning12-0 over the University of Denver.

first appeared: 7/11/2004

Huerfano County (pop. 7,862) was named for Huerfano Butte, a solitary cone-shaped mountain, located near present-day Interstate 25, that was a landmark for American Indians and explorers. Huerfano is the Spanish word for orphan, a reference to the single hill.

first appeared: 7/11/2004

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Glenwood Springs (pop. 7,736) one of America’s Dozen Distinctive Destinations in 2004. The town is known for its natural hot springs, outdoor activities, dining, shopping and frontier past.

first appeared: 6/27/2004

Georgetown (pop. 1,088) made the list of America’s Dozen Distinctive Destinations in 2003. Founded in the 1860s as a silver mining town, Georgetown was known as the “Silver Queen of the Rockies.” The town’s past is preserved in the Georgetown Loop Railroad, considered an engineering marvel at the turn of the 20th century, and in two museums: the 1875 Hotel de Paris and the 1879 Hamill House.

first appeared: 6/27/2004

The May Natural History Museum of the Tropics near Colorado Springs was founded in the 1940s by the May family, whose members had collected 100,000 tropical insects. Exhibits include a 17-inch stick insect from New Guinea, and a 10-inch Indian Actius moth that imitates a cobra to deter predators.

first appeared: 6/20/2004

English settlers arriving in the Eagle River Valley in the 1870s are reported to have named the community Avon (pop. 5,561) because the area reminded them of England’s Avon River Valley. Today, Avon is known as “the heart of the valley.”

first appeared: 6/20/2004

The “Rain of Arrows” off Highway 160 at Mancos (pop. 1,119) features seven 30-foot-tall arrows, which look as if they’re stuck in the ground, and three 25-foot-tall teepees. Created with the help of local Navajo in 1959, it was refurbished in 2000 when the Hampton Inn hotel company helped repaint the arrows and recreate the teepees’ American Indian artwork.

first appeared: 6/13/2004

When it was founded in the early 1860s, Walsenburg (pop. 4,182) was known as Plaza de Los Leones, after an early Spanish settler. It was renamed in the 1870s to recognize prominent businessman Fred Walsen, who opened the area’s first coal mine in 1876. In the 1930s, Walsenburg was known as “The City Built on Coal.”

first appeared: 6/13/2004

Today, the twin mountains rising up from the plains of south-central Colorado near Cuchara are known as the Spanish Peaks, yet they have gone by many different names. The two peaks were called Huajatolla or Wahatoya—or “breasts of the world”—by American Indian tribes. Spanish explorers named them Dos Hermanos (Twin Brothers) and settlers referred to them as the Twin Peaks. In a previous edition, we erroneously placed the mountains in a different part of the state.

first appeared: 6/6/2004

As one of North America’s largest herbal tea companies, Celestial Seasonings supplies tea for more than 1.2 billion cups annually from its headquarters in Boulder on Sleepytime Drive. (The company’s Sleepytime Herb Tea was created in 1970). The company began in the late 1960s when Mo Siegel and friends began picking wild herbs near Aspen (pop. 5,914) and Boulder.

first appeared: 5/30/2004

Opened in 1887, the Strater Hotel in Durango (pop. 13,922) proved a popular winter home for local residents in its early days, because each room had its own wood-burning stove. The Victorian-era hotel cost $70,000 to build, and featured 376,000 red bricks in its construction.

first appeared: 5/23/2004

A 255-ton slab of white marble from the Yule Quarry in Marble (pop. 105) is being sculpted to replace the cracked Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Dedication of the new monument is scheduled for Memorial Day 2005. Marble for the original monument, dedicated in 1932, also came from the Yule Quarry.

first appeared: 5/16/2004

Pikes Peak International Raceway in Fountain (pop. 15,197) was completed in 1997 for a cost of $35 million. At 5,357 feet, the track is one of the highest in elevation in the country.

first appeared: 5/16/2004

In 1910, the town of Rifle (pop. 6,784) built the state’s first hydroelectric power station, which changed the single waterfall on nearby East Rifle Creek into a triple waterfall. Rifle Falls became a state park in 1966, and features lush, almost tropical greenery that grows in the waterfall’s spray—including the rare plant known as the hanging garden sullivantia.

first appeared: 5/9/2004

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