Fools Gold

From the author of The Hidden West comes a remarkable new collection of essays on America's last great frontiers. Telluride, Colorado, is a seven-hour drive from Denver and in the heart of the Four Corners, the only place in America where four states (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) meet one another. Known for droughts, cloudbursts, massive snow piles, and 14,000-plus-foot mountains, Telluride is also a place where cultures collide. When Rob Schultheis arrived in Telluride in 1973, his first home was a tarpaper sheepherder's shack, and Telluride was a sleepy, remote mining town where local families had lived for generations, where officially extinct wolverines and grizzly bears were still seen roaming the countryside. Today Telluride is regarded as a second home to skiers. With wit and insight, Schultheis chronicles the changing face of the once-remote regions of the West and their sometimes reluctant journey into the mainstream.
He tells tales of the landscape, the newcomers, and the locals: the town doctor who chases UFOs in a single-engine Cessna, the sinister magic of desert ghosts, a Navajo rock band that covers old Elvis Presley songs, as well as his own job as a welder at the Dickensian Pandora's mine, and the wild goings-on when cabin fever sets in among the recently arrived (himself included).