Colorado is getting older, rapidly. Are we prepared? "Aging in Colorado" is a new series from The Colorado Sun looking at how these shifts are affecting housing, the workforce and quality of life, and whether Colorado is prepared for it. Support The Sun's work: coloradosun.com/join.
They bought these 17 acres, where the sparkling view of the snow-capped Sangre de Cristos rises above the ponderosa pines, four decades ago, when they were still young.
At first, they lived in a school bus and started a business called Mr. and Mrs. Fix-it, repairing and cleaning homes and businesses across Custer County. Then Mary Hannon, 78, and Cecil McDonald, 83, bought a mobile home and built a wooden deck so they could watch the deer graze the pink-dirt hills and their banty hens peck for bugs.
That trailer home is run-down now. A tattered recliner sits on the porch, near an electric box that powers the house and a water cistern that they have to fill once a week by driving 7 miles into town on a bumpy dirt road.
McDonald shuffles with a walker, keeping chicken feed in the tray so he can toss it to the hens while he sits on the porch and breathes the fresh mountain air. He is still driving, though he sticks to the rural routes and off the highways. Hannon helps him navigate. She is limping after she bumped into the TV stand and cut her leg, which became infected to the bone because she avoided going to the doctor.
They are getting too old to live here, on this land they call “God’s waiting place.”
Custer County, south of Cañon City and west of Pueblo, is the oldest county in the state and one of the oldest in the entire country. The median age is 59.4 years, far above Colorado’s median 38.5 years. There is no hospital, one 14-bed assisted-living center and limited services for people who have grown too old to plow the snow from their driveways or stop driving themselves to the grocery store or the doctor.
Colorado is now the third fastest aging state in the nation, with one-quarter of the population projected to be over the age of 60 by 2050. This is worrisome because the state is not prepared to take care of that burgeoning demographic, or to help them age in place. Nowhere is this more obvious than rural areas — all of the 10 oldest counties in Colorado are rural.
McDonald doesn’t want to leave his home in the woods. He loves the “wildlife, no traffic and no people” way of life too much to give it up. Besides, he doesn’t think they could sell their property for enough money to afford a place in town, one that comes with reliable electricity and water. Hannon is starting to worry what will happen to them, though.
“It’s hard because he falls down a lot, so I have to help him up,” she said, sitting on her porch on a sunny April day, listening to her roosters crow. “And if I’m debilitated with my leg, I can’t even walk right. I’ve gotten him off the deck many times. I called home health care before, and they came out and they said they couldn’t fix him up with home health care unless he’s totally homebound. I never heard of that one.”
On this breezy spring day at least, there was warm food brought to their home by the local senior center’s meal-delivery program. After chatting on the porch, Hannon and McDonald headed inside for roast beef sandwiches, vegetable soup and bananas.
Waitlists for food, in-home services are growing
Colorado would have to ramp up spending by $10 million this year just to eliminate the waitlist of older people who’ve asked for food, in-home services and transportation. That amount will increase exponentially every year that Colorado grows older.
The state is divided into 16 Area Agencies on Aging, which are funded with a mix of state and federal dollars and pay for services like Meals on Wheels and van rides to get people to medical appointments. In just one year, the number of regions with a waiting list for services jumped to 13 from six. And the amount of money needed to clear those lists grew to $10 million from $5.9 million.
From last year to this year, the number of people waiting climbed to 6,700 from 4,900.
The situation will only get more dire.
Next year’s budget includes about $26 million in state funds for the Agencies on Aging, about $1 million more than this year. The federal contribution — usually a close match to the state portion — is yet unknown.
Even if the state came up with the money to eliminate waitlists, that wouldn’t solve the whole problem, said Erin Wester, director of the state Office of Adult, Aging and Disability Services. Local organizations don’t have the staff, volunteers or space to keep up with the growing number of aging residents. Also, inflation is outpacing funding, so the cost to eliminate waitlists just keeps rising, mostly due to the increased price of food and packaging, fuel and labor.
To spare cuts in food and in-home care, state officials sacrificed counseling, education and other services for senior citizens this year.
The largest Area Agency on Aging, which serves eight counties in the Denver metro area, did not renew contracts with nine of its longtime providers, including one that for 15 years helped older people get hearing aids and eyeglasses, according to a November report from the Colorado Department of Human Services. In Adams County, county commissioners pitched in an emergency $50,000 at the end of 2023 to keep the Meals on Wheels program operating for a few weeks after it ran out of money, making sure 550 elderly people still had food.
In Custer County and other rural areas, the lack of services is even more acute. One of the biggest challenges is transportation, because hiring a driver to travel the remote roads around Westcliffe and then circle back to medical appointments in Pueblo or Salida for only a few passengers a week doesn’t make economic sense, said Tom McConaghy, director of the Upper Arkansas Area Agency on Aging, which is based in Salida and includes Custer County.
“People that have a cancer diagnosis and need chemo, or they need dialysis and they have to go regularly to Pueblo, that becomes extremely expensive,” he said. “Maybe they are living on Social Security alone. Well, we don’t have the resources either. We haven’t received a substantial increase in funding since 2018.”
Custer County’s aging population is a mix of fifth- and sixth-generation ranchers and people who moved there to retire. “A lot of them do stay here to the bitter end,” McConaghy said. “We have people in their upper 90s and lower 100s who are living by themselves and are surviving just fine. How well somebody has planned financially is a really important part. It takes money to stay here. It just does.”
But “one change in a health diagnosis can mean having to leave the area. As you age in the mountain regions, you will find yourself making difficult decisions and most likely will have to move into the Front Range or south.”
For those on the poorer end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the ones who qualify for the government’s safety net insurance for the needy, the last resort is a nursing facility that accepts Medicaid. To qualify, though, people need to expend their life savings and assets, including their homes.
“Which is really, really sad,” McConaghy said. Plus, “they are not the idyllic place where you want to spend your last days.”
The costs of these long-term facilities covered by Medicaid have risen to an estimated $100,000 per person per year. “It becomes a burden to the system,” McConaghy said. “That’s why the state of Colorado is in such dismal shape financially.”
State officials started getting serious about planning for an aging population in 2022, when the legislature passed the Modernization of the Older Coloradans Act, which lays out the funding and governing structure of paying for older people’s services. The act, first passed in 1973, had been ignored for nearly 50 years. Projections that Colorado’s population of 60 and older — now at 1.3 million — will increase to 1.5 million by 2030 lit a fire under the conversation.
“The reason that this is an issue is because we have never had to prioritize resources on this scale before,” said Kristine Burrows, the state’s senior specialist on aging at the state human services department.
Now the state has a 10-year plan involving counties, cities and nonprofits to improve services for aging Coloradans. A law passed last year directing state human services officials to review the adequacy of funding distributed to the Area Agencies on Aging, money that comes from the federal Older Americans Act and State Funding for Senior Services.
The goals include building “age-friendly” communities with access to transportation and fewer stairs, fighting ageism and debunking the arbitrary retirement age of 65.
“Because we have historically been a young state,” Burrows said, “we aren’t totally prepared for what is going to happen economically.”
“Did you get out of bed today?”
In Custer County, about 15 people showed up for a community lunch at the senior center, a cozy space in the Silver Cliff town hall basement with a towel in the bathroom that says, “Inside every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened.”
It runs mainly on volunteers, what the locals call the “younger seniors helping older seniors.” For the record, they point out, anyone younger than 80 is a younger senior.
Steve Lasswell, 76, loaded his truck with 17 roast beef sandwiches he is delivering to addresses around Custer County. He’s been the volunteer delivery driver three days each week for about nine years, succeeding a man who died at 92 and had volunteered so long he was delivering meals to the children of his original recipients.
Like so many others, Lasswell remembers the day 13 years ago that he and his wife decided to retire in Custer County. They were living in Phoenix, where he worked for Lockheed Martin, and on a road trip to visit family in Pueblo. “We drove up over Hardscrabble,” Lasswell recalled, speaking of the mountain pass that offers an expansive, breathtaking view of the Sangre de Cristos. “It was the beginning of December 2012, a beautiful sunny day, the mountains were covered with snow. Coming over the top, we said, ‘This is it.’”
He’s still able to shovel snow and has no trouble driving, but Lasswell does worry about what happens if he or his wife need to get to a hospital quickly. There’s a small health center in town, affiliated with Heart of the Rockies Medical Center in Salida an hour away, but it isn’t equipped for full-scale, life-threatening emergencies. That’s why Lasswell and several others in town have purchased emergency helicopter insurance.
“If you have to get there really in a hurry, that’s the way you do it,” he said. There’s no helicopter pad, just an X in the street by the health center or an open field used by search and rescue choppers.
After lunch at the senior center, Allen Brunke, 73, and Brice Berkeland, 68, stick around to chat while working on a puzzle.
Brunke and his wife, Janice, 82, moved from Boulder County nine years ago to retire and stare at what he calls a “billion-dollar view” that includes four 14,000-foot mountains and a dozen 13,000-foot mountains.
“We will never move from here,” he said. And when he’s 93? “I’ll just get more ornery, that’s all.”
To access radiation treatments for prostate cancer, Brunke drove to Pueblo five days a week for nine weeks, about two hours round trip unless it was snowing. It’s still better than living in a city, he maintains, and better for his longevity, too.
“We have no traffic up here. Traffic is five cars,” Brunke said. “It’s much calmer. The biggest aging factor is stress and we have no stress.”
Berkeland, retired and divorced, said he isn’t moving, either.
“I’m here for the long haul,” he said. “From my deck, I can see the entire Sangre range. Driving in here this morning, I saw 24 deer. I don’t walk as much as I should, but I do get out on my four-wheeler or my side-by-side and run around the neighborhood looking at wildlife.”
Berkeland lives on land 14 miles out of town that he inherited from his parents. “I can be at the local clinic to see my primary doctor in 18 minutes,” he said. “It’s your attitude. The biggest things you worry about are first-responders. There are one or two ambulances in the county. That may be a danger. You have to be a little more reliant on yourself.”
His son and daughter live in other states, so Berkeland has a morning check-in routine so that his family knows he’s OK. “I text my sister, my brother and my daughter every morning as I’m drinking my coffee,” he said. “Is somebody going to be a room away that I could scream and they’re going to answer? No, but somebody is going to be calling and going, ‘Hey, somebody needs to go check on him.’”
For the same reasons, volunteer Cheryl Yankoff wants to set up a phone tree, a group she’s calling “phone buddies.”
“It’s just to call and check on people: ‘How are you?’ and ‘Did you get out of bed today?’”Yankoff said. “You don’t see your neighbor on a daily basis and if you did it’s probably because you went to town.”
Yankoff, 59, moved to Custer County with her husband, 67, from western Washington three years ago. Part of her motivation for wanting to improve services in the community is that she plans to stay as long as possible.
Between Yankoff and her husband, they have medical appointments in Salida, Pueblo, Cañon City and Colorado Springs. Transportation is one of the biggest struggles for older residents, she said. People who qualify for Medicaid can get rides through Golden Gate Manor Transportation. The other option is requesting a ride from the nonprofit Wet Mountain Valley Rotary, which charges $25 for shopping or medical trips to Salida and $35 to Colorado Springs.
The local Area Agency on Aging recently started giving out transportation vouchers for $200 per year for those who need them and know they exist. Other help is available for older residents who are veterans — if they are willing to ask.
“We have options,” Yankoff said, “but do people not know about it or are they too proud to accept it?”
“I don’t want to go out there”
Hannon finally signed up for rides from Golden Gate, which will send a driver to her trailer down the dirt road bulging with half-buried boulders. It took her leg injury to push Hannon to do the paperwork.
“It’s hard to navigate in 10-by-50 with four dogs and Cecil with a walker watching TV,” she said, explaining the fall.
After Hannon cut her leg open, she sanitized and bandaged up her ripped-off skin by herself because, she said, the health center in town has a waiting list and she didn’t want to bother with an ambulance. A couple of weeks later though, when her leg became infected, they called the ambulance and Hannon was taken on an hourlong ride to the hospital in Salida. “They gave me a bunch of antibiotics, so that’s what I needed,” said Hannon, who also has had leukemia for about 20 years.
Hannon and McDonald left Nederland 40 years ago to get away from people, not long after a neighbor told Hannon her rooster’s crows were ruining his meditation. She recalls telling the neighbor he would have to get a new religion because she was not getting rid of her rooster.
She passes time on their quiet property by creating decoupage paintings, incorporating cutouts of colorful birds into painted landscapes. Cecil has amassed an antler collection, though he doesn’t get far from the trailer anymore. They both love the wilderness, the flock of wild turkeys that lived on their land, seeing deer with velvet antlers in the fall. In the early days on their property, when they still lived in the school bus, McDonald suggested to Hannon that they go camping. She stared back, in shock, then told him that if he wanted a new view he should park the bus facing another direction.
She jokes that they fell in love because they were both “Cape” people — she’s from Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and he’s from along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. They chased their dream of living in nature all the way to Custer County. But they didn’t think much about what would come next, or how their last chapter would go.
Now, they’re kind of stuck.
“Cecil doesn’t look to the future, and he loves it here and he doesn’t want to leave,” Hannon said.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he told her, “but I don’t know. We’d have to sell this, then we’d have to find something. See, this is not worth as much as the price of a house, even in Westcliffe, so we would probably have to move somewhere where property is cheaper, maybe out on the flats, east of Pueblo somewhere. I don’t want to go out there.”
It’s beautiful here, but not easy. One winter there was 5 feet of snow on the roof and they were worried it would collapse. It didn’t, but the roof of the trailer is bowed to this day. After the storm, they couldn’t leave the house for days. Search and rescue crews called to make sure they were alive.
Until about a year ago, they lived off solar power. Then McDonald’s son, who lives in California, bought them an off-grid system to get electricity into the house.
They also used to have a well. But it dried up. They’ve gone through a series of pickup trucks with water tanks to get water in town. The last one was a Chevy Impala, until the transmission went out. “We’re down to our Sunday van that we bought 15 years ago for $1,000 in mint condition,” he said.
In easier times, McDonald worked in construction building log homes.
“I built eight log homes worth a million dollars and one worth $5 million and look what I ended up with,” he says, as he gestures toward his property.
The view is priceless, he acknowledges. As a younger man, he would shimmy up the ponderosa pines to trim the limbs and maintain the deck’s million-dollar mountain view.
Now, though, the evergreens grow wild. And every year, the vista that drew them here grows a bit harder to see.
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