The Bolder Life: An Introduction, Happy Chicken Style

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a soon-to-be-ongoing blog called The Bolder Life, in which writer Tyra Sutak will chronicle her adventures in Boulder County. You can read Ms. Sutak’s work twice a week at yellowscene.com.

Throughout life, we are often presented with the very important, age-old question: What came first? The chicken or the egg?

While we may never really know the correct answer to this dilemma, we do know what the chicken did next. She spent a few years tucked under mama’s feathers, eating some of the best-cracked corn in the yard. The little chick spent 12 more years getting egg-ducated in the public school system, where she would make lots of chicken little—I mean, little chicken friends—and live in the confines of one of the safest chicken coops in the area. Until one day, she was all grown up, packed and ready for the next four years of her college life.

After that, it’s a little sketchy again. Should the chicken flee the coop and move to the big city? Or maybe join a traveling stock show or rodeo and see the world? Or should she set up a home at a neighboring farm where she could host Sunday dinners with her mama and papa and chicken sisters?

Growing up and making this decision is tough for all chickens, but for the chickens who were lucky enough to grow up on a farm with the Colorado foothills as their compass and a babbling brook singing them to sleep, fleeing the coop requires a lot more thought than most important decisions on leaving home.

As a native of Boulder County, I faced the tough decision of fleeing the coop or making a local nest, and this chick feels like she made the right decision every day she walks out of her modest two-bedroom, one bath nest tucked in the heart of the community that she grew up in. To live in a place that boasts several local farmers’ markets to go “grocery shopping” at, along with plenty of biking and hiking trails on which to burn off the minimum calories to stay enough in shape to contribute to the numerous “fit” accolades that the Boulder County is constantly receiving, is not terrible.  My weekend mornings consist of catching fresh trout from a local lake and my weekend nights consist of cooking that fresh trout along with fresh produce for dinner. I shop local every chance I get, and I am most certainly a fan of the successful small business model and any local coffee shop that artistically paints pretty leafs on the top of my morning vanilla lattes. Although I have more than 20 years of native knowledge, and at least five people a day commenting on their surprise at my local status, I still haven’t seen it all.

Stick with me while I test the waters and see the vast opportunities that Boulder County really has to offer. Whether it’s following me on my first, epic and probably painful mountain biking ride or experiencing the best that Main St. U.S.A. has to offer first hand, I’ll keep you posted on what Boulder County living is really all about.

Stay in touch, beloved BoCo, we have a lot to catch up on.

Tyra Sutak grew up in Lyons and currently lives in Boulder. She is not really a chicken. You can read her blog, A Bolder Life, twice a week at yellowscene.com.