Wednesday, October 14, 2026

A bulldozer operator pushes dirt and finds a mammoth named Snowy

2010 · Snowmass Village

While expanding a reservoir above Snowmass Village, Jesse Steele unearths bones of a juvenile Columbian mammoth. The Denver Museum of Nature & Science shows up and the site becomes one of the richest Ice Age fossil beds in the Rockies.

On October 14, 2010, a third-generation bulldozer driver named Jesse Steele was pushing dirt at Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village when the blade brought up bones.

He and the project foreman recognized they were not ordinary rocks. After some internet research that night, they decided the remains belonged to a mammoth. The juvenile Columbian mammoth was later nicknamed Snowy. Phone calls went out to the Colorado Geological Survey and then to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

What followed was a salvage dig under a tight deadline. Construction needed to resume, winter was coming, and the museum had weeks, not years. Crews recovered thousands of fossils from an ancient alpine lake bed: dozens of American mastodons (the site is still the richest for the species), more mammoths, a Jefferson’s ground sloth (the first ever found in Colorado), Ice Age bison, camels, horses, and a small zoo of amphibians, birds, and plants that were still green after tens of thousands of years.

The site sits at about 8,875 feet. The sediments span roughly 85,000 years of the late Pleistocene. Scientists called it a once-in-a-lifetime find. Most of us just call it the day Colorado found out its ski town used to be a watering hole for elephants.

The reservoir is full again. The bones are in Denver. The story still starts with a guy on a bulldozer who did not throw the weird rock back in the pile.

Sources: Wikipedia: Snowmastodon site · Denver Museum of Nature & Science / Snowmastodon Project · New York Times, July 2011

I-70 finishes the canyon and pretends it was always supposed to fit

1992 · Glenwood Canyon

Governor Roy Romer and a crowd gather inside a tunnel for the ribbon-cutting that opens the last 12 miles of Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon. The road is stacked, bridged, and tunneled so the canyon can still look like itself.

On October 14, 1992, the last unfinished stretch of Interstate 70 in Colorado opened to traffic through Glenwood Canyon.

The 12-mile section had taken roughly a dozen years and about $490 million. Engineers stacked one direction of the highway above the other in places, built 40 bridges and viaducts, bored three tunnels, and left a recreation path along the river. The goal was to move cars without turning the canyon into a scar. At the dedication, more than a thousand people stood inside one of the tunnels while officials cut the ribbon.

Governor Roy Romer and Federal Highway Administrator Thomas Larson called it proof that a highway and a place can coexist. The project later won the Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. At the time, people said it completed the original Interstate Highway System. (A couple of other segments elsewhere took longer, but Colorado was done.)

Drivers still slow down for the view, or for rockfall, or both. The canyon is still the canyon. The highway is the one that learned how to behave.

Sources: Wikipedia: Interstate 70 in Colorado · Colorado Department of Transportation history · Los Angeles Times, Oct. 15, 1992

Denver’s baby doctor stops answering the phone

1952 · Denver

Dr. Justina Ford dies at 81. For fifty years she practiced from her Five Points home, delivered thousands of babies, and kept working until the medical societies finally let her in.

On October 14, 1952, Dr. Justina Laurena Ford died in Denver at the age of 81.

She had arrived in 1902 as the first licensed Black woman physician in Colorado. Hospitals would not grant her privileges. The medical societies would not admit her. She opened a practice in her home in Five Points, learned languages so she could treat the patients who came, and accepted payment in cash, goods, or favors. Patients called her the Baby Doctor. Estimates put the number of deliveries at roughly 7,000.

In 1950 the Colorado and American Medical Associations finally admitted her. She received a human-rights award the next year. She kept seeing patients until about two weeks before she died.

Her house was later moved and now holds the Black American West Museum and Heritage Center. The Ford-Warren Branch Library carries her name. In 2021 the governor declared January 22 Dr. Justina Ford Day.

She did the work for half a century while the institutions caught up. On this date the phone in the house on California Street finally stopped ringing.

Sources: Wikipedia: Justina Ford · Colorado Encyclopedia: Justina Ford · UCHealth: Honoring Dr. Justina Ford