About the Author

Cole Barker was born and raised in a small town in Northeast Texas called Mount Vernon. He went on to become a Sigma Chi at Baylor University, graduating in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in business. Looking for adventure and some cooler weather, Cole decided to move out west and give mountain life a try. He landed in Georgetown, Colorado, where he lived in a log cabin once inhabited by John Denver and got his first real job with benefits. The benefits from working at Loveland Ski Area were “a pass to ski free anywhere in Colorado.” He was hooked. Although he clung tight to his East Texas drawl and came back to his family ranch in Texas every chance he had, Cole quickly became a mountain man in every sense of the title. Somewhere between all the skiing, snowmobiling, dirt biking and general mountain exploration, Cole met a girl named Allison, and, after a three-year courtship, they married.

 

During their first couple of years together, the pair traveled all over Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado for Cole’s job as a drilling fluid engineer. They knew their home would always be in the mountains of Colorado though, and that’s where they eventually settled, after buying an old mining cabin in Silver Plume. While remodeling their cabin, Cole built an excavation business called Red Ram Construction, and with his favorite pieces of equipment—his backhoe, welder, and dump truck—Cole quickly became known in the Clear Creek Valley as the hardworking mountain man from Texas.