There's only one World Championship Pack Burro Race. There is no tougher race, no better race --- and every burro racer knows it. Even our lap dog state and national media know it. The Fairplay Burro Days pack burro race is the longest, the most tricky footing and diverse terrain, the most stream crossings, snowfields and true burro handling, bushwhackin', jack-whackin', kick ass course to be run.

  As for running events, even the lauded New York City marathon, with its $50,000 first place prize money plus Mercedes, doesn't compare in athletic challenge nor tradition nor culture.

  I've run New York City, Boston, the Leadville Trail 100 and dozens of so-called tough marathons and ultras around the country but nothing matches the sheer animal joy and ferocity and patience of the Fairplay-to-Mosquito Pass-and-back race. I've never missed one of the Fairplay burro races over 27 years. I perhaps have an inordinant respect and love for the tradition, heritage and good, honest purses Fairplay has afforded the sport. I've measured the strength of my youth, the guile of my middle age and now the joy and toughness of incipient geezerhood with this precious central Rockies event. I was 27, a quasi- Native American with hair to my shoulders when bullgoose, enthusiastic Fairplay natives and their committee encouraged me to give this race a try. They went out in jeeps to show me the course. Leaving town, the course was a flagged, cross-country ramble on an old railroad bed; it ran on trails in the trees parallel to the Mosquito Pass Road. Those days it was considered wussy stuff to run on the dirt roads.

  I'm not one of those guys who thinks his generation is tougher, but I'll say this… the spirit of community and barn-building and bringing along youth in civic activities was never more nakedly apparent to me when I got my first taste of Fairplay burro committees. It was as if these people laid awake all winter trying to think of ways to involve youth and middle age juvenile delinquents in their last of the noncommercial, epic true West sport. These committee people weren't necessarily runners, but they had the fire of enthusiasm of a tribe of fun-loving, endurance testing maniacs. Plus they had their Prunes Monument and burro tradition year round. I've helped build the sport from two races to seven, "goosing" decent purses, decent competitors, better animals and volunteer committees all over Colorado. But Fairplay is still the model -- a small, cantankerous town with the sister town on the course where an irate citizen might drive a front end loader into a town building. Somehow, these citizens love their area, the critters, the athletes and their ritual enough every year to come out and celebrate the sweetest time in the high country with their unique celebration.

  Much of rural Colorado -- Park County, particularly -- has undergone "Future Shock" with growth, commuting and our over-amped rate of change. There are new faces on the World Championship committee, but I see the same glint of mischief and rebellion and high country tests in their eyes. They may not have seen 20 years of the blood, sweat, leather, animal smells, pain, loss, breakthroughs and, most of all, joy, but there's still a whiff of it in the air. At 53, I'm a long shot at best to ever win this race again, but what keeps me coming back is an extension of the joy of that original committee/tribe of folks/family I first met in '73. It's the seasons; it' s the burros, the humor and the long suffering bray. 

  See you in Fairplay the last Sunday in July.