Colorado history

Thursday, September 10, 2026

A Fruita rooster declines to become dinner, the Western Slope gets a 40-kiloton science experiment, and a Boulder runner turns the last day of a ruined Olympics into gold.

A Fruita farmer swings an axe and Colorado gets an 18-month celebrity rooster

1945 · Fruita

On Sept. 10, 1945, Lloyd Olsen of Fruita took a five-and-a-half-month-old Wyandotte rooster named Mike out back for supper. The axe missed the jugular and most of the brain stem. Mike stood up, tried to preen, and spent the next 18 months proving that Colorado will turn almost anything into a roadside attraction.

Olsen was prepping 40 to 50 birds for market. Clara plucked; Lloyd swung. One young rooster kept walking. The next morning Mike was in the coop with his stump tucked under a wing, scratching as if the previous day had been a scheduling error.

University of Utah scientists later explained the physiology: one ear, a clot in the jugular, and enough brain stem left to run the motor functions. Olsen fed him grain and a milk-and-water mix with an eyedropper. A Salt Lake promoter named Hope Wade put him on a circuit. Life magazine photographed him on Oct. 22, 1945. People paid a quarter. At the peak, on a Long Beach boardwalk, as many as 600 a day filed past. Mike was insured for $10,000.

He died March 17, 1947, in a Phoenix motel, choking on mucus after Olsen left the syringe at the last show. Fruita did not let the story go. There is a metal statue at Aspen and Mulberry. There is a festival in May with a 5K called Run Like a Headless Chicken and a contest called Pin the Head on the Chicken. Guinness still lists him as the longest-lived chicken without a head.

The Western Slope has produced peaches, dinosaur quarries, and this bird. Only one of those requires an eyedropper.

Sources: Wikipedia — Mike the Headless Chicken · Mike the Headless Chicken Festival — official history · History Colorado — Headless Chicken Inspires Fruita · Roadside America — Mike the Headless Chicken

Colorado detonates a nuclear bomb to see if the gas will come out

1969 · near Grand Valley (now Parachute)

On the afternoon of Sept. 10, 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission and Austral Oil set off a 40-kiloton nuclear device 8,400 feet under Battlement Mesa, about eight miles from Grand Valley. The idea was to shatter tight Mesaverde sandstone and shake natural gas loose. The gas came. It also glowed a little.

Project Rulison was the second Plowshare shot aimed at “stimulating” a gas field and the first nuclear explosion ever fired in Colorado. The device sat in a well 8,426 to 8,442 feet down. Winds delayed the shot six days. When northwest air finally arrived, 37 families inside a five-mile circle were asked to leave for the afternoon.

Observers six miles out felt the ground sway, then a small aftershock. Dust lifted off the shale bluffs. Muffled thunder rolled down the Colorado River valley. USGS seismographs recorded 16 tiny aftershocks, all under magnitude 1, in the first 43 minutes. A claims office in Grand Valley logged 362 property-damage complaints — cracked plaster, rattled chimneys — before it closed.

The chimney of broken rock did free gas. The gas carried radioactivity. It was never sold into kitchens. Cleanup ran into the 1990s. The Department of Energy's Office of Legacy Management still watches the pad. Colorado voters later wrote a nuclear-detonation veto into the state constitution, which is how you know a science fair has left a mark.

Grand Valley is Parachute now. The plaque is still out there in the sage, counting the feet and the kilotons. Hydraulic fracturing eventually did the job without the mushroom-shaped footnote.

Sources: Wikipedia — Project Rulison · Colorado Sun — 50 years later · Colorado Public Radio — voters get a veto · DOE Office of Legacy Management — Rulison

Frank Shorter of Boulder wins the Olympic marathon in the city where he was born

1972 · Munich / Boulder

On Sept. 10, 1972, Frank Shorter — Munich-born, Boulder-trained — won the Olympic marathon in 2:12:19. He was the first American to take the event since 1908. Five days earlier, terrorists had murdered 11 Israelis in the Olympic Village. He ran anyway, broke at 15 kilometers, and finished alone.

Shorter first landed in Boulder in 1970 because the University of Colorado had an indoor track above 5,000 feet. Before Munich he spent three months in Vail with Jeff Galloway and Jack Bacheler, coming down twice a week for intervals. The altitude experiment worked. Galloway finished fourth. Bacheler was ninth.

The race started at 3 p.m. Seventy-four men from 39 countries. Shorter took the lead around the 15-kilometer mark and was never caught. A German prankster, Norbert Sudhaus, jogged into the stadium first in a stolen official's kit; the crowd booed the real champion through the last lap. Time: 2 hours, 12 minutes, 19 seconds. Belgium's Karel Lismont took silver. Ethiopia's Mamo Wolde, the defending champion, took bronze.

What followed is the part Colorado still lives with. Recreational running stopped being a curiosity. Shorter opened a shop on Pearl Street. In 1979 he and Steve Bosley started the Bolder Boulder, which grew from a couple thousand people into a Memorial Day civic religion. He won Olympic silver in Montreal in 1976 and later chaired the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

He was born in Munich because his father was an Army doctor stationed there. He trained in Boulder because the air is thin and the trails are close. Sept. 10 is the date those two facts met on a road in Bavaria.

Sources: Wikipedia — 1972 Olympic men's marathon · Denver Post — Shorter in Munich · Denver Post — how Boulder became a running mecca · Colorado Sports Hall of Fame — Frank Shorter