Remembering Patrick O’Toole

I knew him in college, but what he did beyond amazes me even now. A product of Florida, he became a successful and thoughtful rancher on the Colorado-Wyoming border.

by Allen Best

A few weeks ago I was in Aurora, at the annual winter conference of the Colorado Water Congress. Making my way through the hallway, I noticed Erin Light, who is the division engineer for the Yampa, White, and Little Snake rivers of northwest Colorado, talking with a younger guy. I glanced at his name badge: “O’Toole.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you the son of Patrick and Sharon.”

Indeed, he was.

I told him that I had yet to write to his mother expressing my condolences about the passing of his father a year or more before.

Sharon — who then wore the last name of Salisbury – was my first news editor at the CSU Collegian. I had been a diffident student, an undisciplined dabbler. I had no intention of getting into journalism. Writing on deadline tied my stomach in knots.

It was suggested that I might try my hand at the newspaper. And so I had. I remember my first assignment. I couldn’t type it. I had to write it out in longhand. It was slow and agonized. Sentences! Orderly sentences! I was a project.

Sharon dealt with me patiently. And I remember conversations in the newsroom at the Collegian that spring involving Patrick O’Toole. He was a columnist. I had an idea that he and Sharon were a couple.

At some point, I moved beyond college to explore the world. I worked at a printing plant, then was a rodman for a surveyor in the prospective oil fields of Wyoming and Utah. After a year of this. I was alerted to a newspaper job in Kremmling. For whatever reason, Ed and Martha Quillen hired me to work at the Middle Park Times.

After about a year and a half at that newspaper, I quit and went to work at the Hayden Valley Press. (Like every other newspaper where I worked full time, it no longer exists). On my first day of driving over Gore Pass to collect news or at least features from Toponas to Steamboat Springs, the temperature on the thermometer of Bob Shay’s Phillips 66 station was 60 below. Honest.

This weekly journey put me in Craig some of the time, and I remember reading a local story about Pat and Sharon – who by then were married – tending sheep amid the deep, deep cold of winter in the sagebrush steppes of Moffat County. That is such a very different setting than the college campus in Fort Collins where I had encountered them several years before. It was also, I hasten to add, a very, very cold and snowy winter.

Over the decades, I was vaguely conscious of the lives of the O’Tooles. She was the daughter of a prominent rancher in the Little Snake River, which starts in the Park Range near Bridger Pass, in southern Wyoming, and wanders southwesterly to a junction with the Yampa River near the boundary of Dinosaur National Park. At some point, I became aware he had become a state representative in the Wyoming Legislature.

Then one day 10 to 15 years ago I got a phone call. It was Patrick, and he wanted to talk water. He had seen a story I had written for Headwaters Magazine and was favorably impressed with the piece.

After that, we stayed in touch. Sometimes I would see him at the Water Congress summer gatherings in Steamboat. Once, in early March 2020, we both attended a meeting at the Hayden Town Hall. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis was there to hear about what lie ahead for the coal-based economy in Craig and Hayden. Tri-State Generation & Transmission Association had announced its plans to close its units in Craig just a couple months before. Colorado legislators the prior year had ordered that this energy transition would be a just one. What exactly did a just transition look like? (We are still trying to figure that out.)

That, incidentally, was the day that news arrived of Colorado’s first confirmed case of covid. I can remember Polis sitting there, in one of the council member seats, hearing the drone of testimony but likely trying to sort through the implications of this news that had undoubtedly reached him.

During a break, Patrick and I talked outside. For some reason, we ended up comparing notes about our careers as track athletes. He had grown up in Florida and, as a high schooler, had notched a time of 4:15 in the mile run. In Fort Morgan, I had broken a school record set previously in 1944. My time in 1968 was 4:44.4. That was my last opportunity to run the mile in high school because the coach put me on the two-mile run. Which I hated. In my freshman year at a small college in Missouri I did turn in 4:24.

During that same conversation, I learned that Patrick had been a philosophy major in college. It was, he said, a very good instruction for life. And in his case, a life of tending sheep, growing hay, and feeding cattle – and trying to figure out how his family’s property could become part of the energy transition.

In October 2020, in our first break from covid confinement, Cathy and I drove to Craig, and from there wandered around northwest Colorado as well as to Dinosaur for several days. We returned to Denver in a roundabout way, stopping to talk with Jay Fetcher at his ranch in the Elk River Valley north of Steamboat. His father had co-founded the big ski area at Steamboat. Jay, though, was very much a rancher, if an odd one. He was also a Democrat. Please do not vote for the reintroduction of wolves, he said to me. “Let them come back on their own.”

From Jay’s ranch along the Elk River we followed the route of John Charles Frémont in, I believe, 1844, across the divide to the Little Snake drainage. The leaves of early October were golden as you can see from the above photo, which I took on or near the O’Toole’s Ladder Ranch. Their house is in Wyoming but perhaps a hundred yards from Colorado. Two weeks prior, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet had also been sitting on that deck talking about forest management with the O’Tooles. That conversation led to a bill that Bennet introduced in Congress.

O’Toole was not to be confused with a conventional environmentalist. He believed in forest management. And he believed very much in policies to benefit agrarian users of the Colorado River Basin. He saw a strategic alliance between ranchers of the basin with Native American tribes. I would write at length about the interesting politics of this.

After that, I talked with him several times again. The last time was in October 2023. He was coughing as we spoke. He said he planned a trip to National Jewish Hospital, a place with which I have had some familiarity of my own over the last 20 years. I proposed to meet with him when he was in the city, but I never heard back.

Then, a few months later, I learned that he had died.

I shared only a small portion of this with his son in Aurora. At length, the son said he needed to get on the road. He had an engagement in Laramie that evening, I think a basketball game involving his son, a student at the high school in Baggs. That’s nearly three hours from Laramie, and the O’Toole house is another 30 to 45 minutes up the Little Snake River. Sometimes they travel to Utah for games. In Wyoming, everybody spends a lot of time driving.

Postscript: Senators from both Colorado and Wyoming paid tribute to Pat O’Toole in comments on the floor of the Senate in March 2024. You can see and hear them on this YouTube video.

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