Colorado history

Friday, September 11, 2026

A Littleton captain trades a trip so he can take his wife to London, five metro firefighters start climbing 110 stories, and a September rain in Boulder refuses to stay in the creek.

A Littleton captain is on the only hijacked plane that does not reach its target

2001 · Littleton / Cheyenne Mountain / Shanksville, Pa.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, United Flight 93 left Newark for San Francisco with Capt. Jason M. Dahl of Littleton in the left seat. He had traded onto the trip so he and his wife, Sandy, could fly to London that weekend for their fifth anniversary. Four hijacked airliners killed nearly 3,000 people. Flight 93 was the only one that did not reach the building it was aimed at.

Dahl was 43, a United standards captain who trained other pilots, and he lived in Ken Caryl Ranch with Sandy and their kids. He carried, as he always did, a small box of rocks his son had given him. Hijackers took the cockpit about 46 minutes after takeoff. Passengers and crew, who had learned by phone what had already happened in New York, rushed the cabin. The Boeing 757 went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. Eastern. Everyone aboard was killed. Investigators concluded the intended target was the U.S. Capitol or the White House.

Colorado was on every part of that morning. More than two dozen people with documented Colorado ties died on the four planes or in the buildings they hit, among them Kathryn LaBorie of Colorado Springs, the lead flight attendant on United 175, and Christopher Faughnan of Arvada, a Cantor Fitzgerald trader on the 104th floor of the north tower. Inside Cheyenne Mountain, NORAD was already hours into a war-games exercise aimed at a theoretical Russian attack. The sensors were pointed outward. When the real calls came in from the FAA, the first question in the mountain was whether this was the exercise.

Colorado Air National Guard F-16s later flew a combat air patrol over Denver and Colorado Springs. U.S. Northern Command was stood up the next year and parked next to NORAD. Twenty-five years on, World Trade Center steel sits in memorials from Fort Carson to firehouses in Louisville and Denver. In Ken Caryl a granite marker with an eagle still reads: May he soar with the eagles. Sandy Dahl's scholarship fund has sent hundreds of aviation students to school. The date did not get smaller. Colorado just learned how to carry it.

Sources: National Park Service — Capt. Jason M. Dahl · Denver Post — Coloradans killed on 9/11 · Colorado Newsline — NORAD on 9/11 · Captain Jason Dahl Scholarship Fund

Five metro firefighters climb 110 stories and invent a national ritual

2005 · 1999 Broadway, Denver

On Sept. 11, 2005, five Denver-area firefighters — three from Denver Fire, two from Castle Rock — put on full gear at the tower at 1999 Broadway and climbed the equivalent of the World Trade Center. They were not starting a brand. They were keeping a monthly workout from feeling empty on the anniversary.

The group had already been meeting on first Saturdays to talk shop and haul hose up downtown stairs. The fourth anniversary of 9/11 fell on a Sunday. They decided the workout that day should match the height the FDNY climbed: 110 stories. Oren Bersagel-Briese, then with Castle Rock Fire, was one of the five. Denver Fire Chief Dave McGrail had lost a friend in the FDNY that morning. Nobody timed it. Nobody sold shirts.

Twelve climbers came the next year. Then 250. By 2008 the downtown climb had to cap itself at 343 — one spot for each firefighter killed at the Trade Center — and each climber carried a badge with a name and a photograph. The wait list spilled into other departments. In 2009 West Metro Firefighters Local 1309 and Shawn Duncan stood up a second climb at Red Rocks, outdoors, with room to breathe. The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation later folded the model into a national program. Dozens of cities now do it on the same morning.

Red Rocks is a strange place to remember a New York high-rise. The steps are sandstone. The horizon is the Front Range. That turns out to be the point. You climb until your legs argue, you look up, and you are still in Colorado, which is the only answer the five men at 1999 Broadway ever had.

Sources: Colorado 9/11 Stair Climb — history · 5280 — Colorado origins of the worldwide climb · FireRescue1 — how five firefighters started it

A birthday-party drive home on Linden becomes the first night of the 2013 flood

2013 · Boulder / Jamestown

On the night of Sept. 11, 2013, four friends left a birthday party in the hills above northwest Boulder in a silver Subaru. Water and mud were already coming down Linden Drive. By morning two of them — Wesley Quinlan, 19, of Erie, and Wiyanna Nelson, 19, of Lafayette — were gone. The rain did not stop for days.

Emily Briggs was driving. Rocks and runoff slapped the car on the steep two-lane. Wesley took the wheel. Farther down Linden a mudslide had already flipped a Jeep. The Subaru stuck. Three of the four climbed out. Only one made it to high ground. Search dogs found Wesley and Wiyanna the next day. The Boulder County coroner later ruled both drownings. Wesley had just graduated from Centaurus High. Wiyanna was a senior there.

The same night in Jamestown, a building came down on Joseph Howlett, 72, the former owner of the Jamestown Mercantile. He died of blunt-force injuries. Gerald Boland, 80, of Lyons, would be found a week later in the St. Vrain. Statewide the September flood killed six people, damaged about 19,000 homes, destroyed more than 1,500, and tore out dozens of highway bridges. Governor Hickenlooper declared a disaster in 11 counties. President Obama added a major-disaster declaration for Boulder County.

September on the Front Range is supposed to be the month you trust. The 2013 storm did not read the calendar. It sat over the foothills and wrung itself out for the better part of a week. Linden Drive is open again. The names from that first night are still the ones Boulder says when someone asks when the water came.

Sources: Denver Post — teen couple on Linden Drive · Boulder Daily Camera — coroner rulings · NCEI Storm Events — Sept. 11, 2013 flood