The Journal
Everything in the open — essays on their own, and series gathered together.
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Series Digging Up Guffey
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1 The Price of Idaville
There are about thirty of us in Guffey most of the year, and not one of us is named Guffey. They do turn up, though. Every so often somebody comes thr…
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2 Twenty-Two Dollars
In October of 1928 a widow walked into the office of the Cripple Creek Times and Victor Record and bought three months of legal notice. She was sixty-…
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A Bet on Another Season
Written in the truck with stops for sanity and soul, Taylor Park through Grand Junction, on toward Salt Lake and Idaho. Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was sitting on a log n…
2026-09-14 · Mike Smith -
Twenty-five years ago this morning I was sitting on the side of a mountain above timberline, waiting on light. My uncle and I had walked out of camp in the predawn dark to get to a…
2026-09-11 · Mike Smith -
Today, big things are happening at Park County surrounding the county manager position and the person the commissioners chose to replace Mike Smith. And as I watch it unfold, I kee…
2026-09-01 · Kate -
Verse 1 She came down from the Smokies With the mountains in her voice, Born into a house where hope Was less a gift than choice. In a coat of many colors, Stitched with dignity an…
2026-09-01 · Mike Smith -
The Best Chapter Came After
One year ago yesterday, we finished one of the biggest moves of our lives. We packed. We hauled. We sweated. We swore enough to make a sailor uncomfortable. And with the help of so…
2026-09-01 · Mike Smith -
Five Years in Guffey When Mike and I came to Guffey five years ago, we weren’t dreaming of owning a bar and restaurant. Our dream was liquor. For years on the Western Slope, making…
2026-08-31 · Kate -
I keep thinking about how much can change in a year. I’m in a good place. A really good place. And I’m not handing that over to anybody. People can talk. They can recycle old stori…
2026-08-31 · Kate -
On artificial intelligence and the friction we removed
The Marine Corps doesn't build character; they reveal it. I am not a Marine, though I have known and admired many. I only borrow the line because it turns out to explain something…
2026-08-30 · Mike Smith -
Series Becoming Local
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Intro Becoming Local: Notes from Guffey, Colorado
I moved to a town of about a hundred people at eight thousand six hundred feet, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I had lived in small pla…
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1 The Burden of Discovery
Seventy-two degrees in the Gallatin canyon on a Saturday in August. Partly cloudy. The river running green on the left, the highway bending along with…
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2 How You Tell Them Apart
In the last piece I made an argument I still believe: that the weight you feel about a place you've lived a long time is not disappointment, it's info…
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3 The Equilibrium
There is a county in Colorado whose land use regulations, until recently, contained exactly one definition of a distillery. It described a fuel operat…
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4 The Water and the Well
Our second day in town, I was standing on a porch talking with a neighbor. I was doing what a person does on his second day somewhere. Introducing mys…
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5 The Currency of Being Local
There is a joke people used to make in Colorado, especially the people that lived up in the rural mountain valleys. People in Colorado take a certain…
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Intro
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My mom passed away four years ago, and there still isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t talk to her—or to my dad, who has been gone much longer. But there is one part of my day wh…
2026-08-16 · Kate