Falborn Brothers

A decade ago, the Falborn brothers were running wild across their family’s west Longmont farm. It was a life of chasing frogs, raising sheep, and collecting fossils — their own sprawling universe built from dirt, water, and whatever creatures they could catch in their hands.

Now, the Falborns have traded their cowboy hats for very different callings, each carving out a life that might seem unrecognizable to their younger selves — except, at the edges of every path, you can still see the dust from those endless summers. Whether they’re standing in European kitchens, behind a camera, in a lecture hall, or at the edge of a dance floor, the farm boy is never far behind.

Photos by original photographer Paul Wedlake recreating the original photo shoot

Wyatt Falborn

These days, Wyatt Falborn’s life looks a little different. Now in his early twenties, Wyatt has traded Longmont’s wide-open skies for the tightly packed chaos of Tavernetta, a high-end Italian restaurant in Denver. His days and nights are filled with the clatter of sauté pans and the sharp, rhythmic choreography of the line, a world away from the quiet of the family farm.

Still, none of this feels like a departure to Wyatt. “We always had fresh produce and animals that we had processed, so we always needed to cook a lot, and I just started helping my mom out when I was a kid, and I just grew to love cooking,” Wyatt explained with a smile.

He still plays with food the way he used to, only now the ingredients are more refined and the dirt under his fingernails has been swapped for the burn scars of a working cook. After a stint at Black Cat, where he started as a dishwasher before stepping into the kitchen, the path forward was clear. “At some point, I started helping out in the kitchen and haven’t stopped since,” Wyatt said, matter-of-factly, like there was never really another option.

Wyatt’s ambitions stretch beyond Denver. “I really want to go to Europe. Me and a chef buddy of mine just recently bought plane tickets for a three-month trip out there. We’re just gonna hop around and look for places to work so that we can get visas.” Whether it’s a Michelin-starred kitchen in France or a return to Longmont’s fields, Wyatt is still that same farm kid, just with sharper knives and bigger dreams.

Satchel Falborn

While Wyatt found his calling in the kitchen, Satchel Falborn found his behind a camera. Now a media production major at CU Boulder, Satchel spends more time than he ever expected framing life through a lens, capturing stories instead of catching frogs.

Photography is his main focus, but filmmaking has crept into the mix, with short films pieced together alongside friends. That same curiosity, the need to see, understand, and document the world around him, is still there, just expressed in a new language.

Most of his classmates know him as a filmmaker and ski bum, not a farm kid. The disconnect between those two identities still catches him off guard sometimes. “Most people have no idea,” he said. “I tell them, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, you grew up on a farm.’”

He’s swapped daily farm chores for weekend ski trips, but the land still pulls at him. “If I had my choice, I’d go back to it someday,” Satchel admitted. For now, though, he’s content to follow his creative spark, knowing the farm, and all its lessons, will still be there when he’s ready.

Photo by Paul Wedlake

Harrison Falborn

While Wyatt sharpened his knives and Satchel honed his eye, Harrison Falborn stayed rooted in the dirt that shaped him. Now a double major in agricultural education and livestock business management at Colorado State University, Harrison has never really left the farm, even when he’s miles away from it.

He’s still chasing the feeling he found as a kid, steering the John Deere Gator on his dad’s lap, heading down to check on the sheep. “I miss moments like that where I got to slow down and enjoy those times and find something that I truly loved in that moment and not just live through it,” he said.

Somewhere between catching toads in the yard and freezing under the stars during late-night chores, Harrison fell in love, not just with the land but with the work and the life that comes with it. That love carried him through years of 4-H and Future Farmers of America, eventually landing him as a Colorado state FFA officer, where he helped provide guidance to over 9,000 students across the state.

Now, he’s the guy in the cowboy hat at CSU, a living reminder that farm kids do, in fact, go to college. “It’s kind of funny to them that a guy in a cowboy hat is walking around campus,” Harrison said with a mischievous smile. No matter where his education and career take him, that hat will always point him home.

Photo by Paul Wedlake

August Falborn

August Falborn has always been a bit of a shape-shifter, the kid equally comfortable chasing chickens, practicing trumpet, or digging for fossils in the backyard. These days, that adaptability has become one of his strongest assets. Now a journalism student at CU Boulder, August is exploring a future in sports reporting, blending his love of writing with the natural curiosity that made him such a fixture in the fields as a kid. His trumpet, however, hasn’t been left behind. Music is still part of who he is, whether it’s a creative outlet, a side hustle, or just something to keep his hands busy.

The shift from farm kid to future journalist hasn’t erased the call of home. August makes it back to Longmont as often as he can, sometimes every weekend, drawn by the chance to see his parents, brothers, and the ever-evolving cast of animals. “There’s just something about being able to walk out your back door into all that open space,” August said. These days, his third-floor Boulder apartment offers little more than a view of a parking lot, a reality that’s both expected and disappointing after a childhood defined by open fields.

One day, August wants a farm of his own, a place where his kids can roam free, just like he and his brothers once did. Until then, he’s writing his way there, blending the storytelling skills he’s sharpening in school with the innate understanding that every good story starts with a little dirt under your fingernails.

Ethan Frank

Ethan Frank’s story has always been driven by music, the endless conversation between keys, horns, and improvising minds trying to keep up with one another. Piano was never just a hobby; it was a language Ethan learned young and never stopped speaking.

These days, that language has expanded. Now finishing his degree at Michigan State University, Ethan is spending a week in Detroit, rehearsing with the Gathering Orchestra at the Carr Center. “It’s a really great experience,” Ethan said. “We’re playing a lot of music, getting instruction. It’s just a great band.”

At Michigan State, jazz is still his foundation, but the edges have blurred. Composition, arranging, and film scoring have all crept in. “I’ve really gotten to kind of broaden my horizons here and get into a lot of different types of music and a lot of different situations,” he said.

That openness shaped him into a musician who doesn’t draw clear lines between playing and composing. “In jazz, improvisation is just composition on the spot,” Ethan said. Writing film scores just gives him more time to experiment and refine. “I can edit, think, arrange for larger groups, but it all comes from the same place.”

Some of his most surreal moments have come standing alongside his professors, Rodney Whitaker and Carmen Bradford, musicians whose careers stretch back decades. “Playing with them is really special,” Ethan said. “They both have legendary careers, and getting to work with them has been such a privilege.”

Film scoring snuck into his life by accident. A longtime film lover, Ethan joined a campus film club his freshman year. Before long, friends were asking him to score their projects. “That was my way in,” he said. “And it’s grown into so much more than I expected.”

As for what’s next, Ethan isn’t interested in picking a single path. He’s applied to graduate programs in New York and Miami, with an eye on New York’s jazz scene, but teaching, composing, and performing all have a place in his future. “I don’t ever want to do just one thing,” he says. “All of my mentors, they’re all doing a little bit of everything. That’s what keeps it fresh.”

No matter where he ends up — a festival stage, a studio, a film set — Ethan’s philosophy stays simple: “Just show up. Half the battle is being there, building relationships, and being part of the hang.”

Meredith Yacht

When Meredith “Merry” Yacht was first featured, she was a 7-year-old with a big smile, a BraveHood pulled over her head, and a story that stretched far beyond her years. The hooded t-shirts her family created were more than clothing. They were armor for her and countless other kids battling cancer, giving them a little more control over how the world saw them at a time when so much was out of their hands.

BraveHoods reached its final chapter after the family hit their goal of donating 15,000 shirts to kids around the world. Meredith looks back on it with nothing but pride. “I take it as an inspiration to myself,” she said, “to take a bad thing or a negative thing and turn it into something very, very positive.” Building a business with her mom from their own experience taught her what it looks like to channel difficulty into purpose, a lesson that’s stuck with her ever since.

These days, Meredith’s life looks a lot like any other high school senior’s but with her own twist. She’s waiting on college decisions, hoping to head to the East Coast to be closer to family, and she’s spent the last few years fully immersed in her school’s FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics team. “I’m part of the hardware team,” she explained. “I do the CADing and then physically build the robot.” This spring, her team heads to the championship in Houston.

Alongside robotics, tennis has become another constant in Meredith’s life — a sport she never expected to fall for but now can’t imagine giving up. She joined her freshman year, never having played before, and hasn’t put down her racket since.

Being a survivor means living with the side effects — some obvious, others not so much. “It’s really an invisible disability,” she said. “Looking at me, you would never know I had cancer. But we always say, ‘You never stop battling cancer.’” For Meredith, that means navigating severe hearing loss in her right ear, the result of life-saving treatments.

The perspective that comes with all of that — the fight, the recovery, the aftermath — has shaped how Meredith sees her future. Instead of pursuing her passion for robotics, she’s leaning toward law, especially the kind that lets her advocate for people who can’t always advocate for themselves. Whatever comes next, Meredith is ready. After all, she’s spent her whole life learning how to fight for what matters.

The Next Superkids

Aliya Union

For most of her life, Aliya Union let fear take the lead. Not in any paralyzing way, more the quiet kind of fear that makes a kid hesitate, second-guess, and avoid anything that might risk failure or embarrassment. It was familiar and protective, but it was also shrinking the edges of her world. “A lot of her self-worth was tied up in succeeding,” said her mom, Christina Union.

But when her fifth-grade class was tasked with creating a passion project — a year-long assignment meant to explore what they love — Aliya found herself stuck. She didn’t know what her passion was yet, just that fear was always standing between her and the next new thing, so she flipped the whole assignment upside down. Instead of picking a single passion, she became her own project, spending the year facing her fears, one by one. “She wanted to identify as someone who faces their fears,” Christina said, “not conquers them, just faces them.”

Some of the scariest moments didn’t come from sharks or heights but from standing in front of her classmates. “Doing things in front of people is the hardest part,” Aliya said. “Singing, playing violin, speaking in front of my class.”

“She wanted it to be something that could keep going,” Christina said. “A program where every fifth grader faces one fear before they head off to middle school.” Aliya created a hallway display where kids could write down their fears and offer ideas for how to face them. She’s working on a final video, blending her classmates’ clips with her own — not a highlight reel of victories but a messy, honest record of kids stepping into the unknown.

Aliya isn’t trying to become fearless — that was never the point. The point is showing up scared — again and again — until the fear loses its grip. The point is proving to herself, and anyone watching, that fear is just the starting line.

Zack Sadovnik

Zack Sadovnik doesn’t really separate his passions into neat little boxes. Music, math, engineering — for him, they’re all just different ways to explore the same itch: solving problems, figuring out how pieces fit, and getting lost in the kind of challenge that makes time disappear.

A junior at Cherry Creek High School, Zack splits his time between band practice, engineering projects, and the long list of things he wants to try before high school runs out. The ultimate goal? Aerospace engineering. NASA, if everything falls into place. “The whole field is just problem-solving,” Zack said. “And solving problems — whether it’s designing a plane part or figuring out a tricky drum fill — that’s how I connect with people.”

That same drive to tinker and push boundaries fuels Purple Sun, the band he’s been part of for the last two years. Zack jumps between instruments depending on the song — guitar, piano, drums, even harmonica if the mood’s right. “At the end of the day, music’s just supposed to be fun,” he said. “It’s where I get to mess around, try new things, see what sticks.”

Engineering, though, calls for a different kind of creativity — the kind that’s rooted in precision and patience. Zack knew it was more than just a passing interest when he enrolled at Cherry Creek Innovation Campus last year. “That’s where it really clicked for me,” Zack said. “It made me realize I want to design and build things that fly.”

This summer, he’ll be putting those skills to the test at the National Technology Student Association Conference in Nashville. After winning first place at state in the Prepared Presentation competitive event, Zack will also compete in Flight Endurance, where students design, build, and fly rubber-powered planes, and On-Demand Video, a fast-turnaround filmmaking challenge. “Flight Endurance is my favorite,” Zack said. “It’s all hands-on. You’re constantly adjusting, fixing, problem-solving right there on the spot.”

Zack isn’t in a rush to choose between engineering and music. “I don’t think I could give up either,” he said. “Music’s where I have fun, but engineering’s where I feel like I’m building something real.” Whatever comes next — a NASA internship, a packed gig, maybe both — Zack’s more interested in seeing how all the pieces fit together than following a straight line.

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