Curtis Imrie, a rural icon who raised and raced burros, and ran unsuccessfully for both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Colorado legislature, died Saturday night while preparing to show one of his animals at the National Western Stock Show.
Imrie, 70, died of a heart attack as he was walking through a barn to prepare a donkey for the show ring, Stock Show president Paul Andrews said on Monday.
“He certainly died with his boots on,” his brother Gordon Imrie said. “He was literally backstage at the Stock Show.”
Growing up in Georgia, Imrie was interested in animals. He took horseback riding lessons, and “he would catch little critters, he loved snakes and chipmunks,” Gordon Imrie said.
He attended Northwestern University, where he was a Big 10 wrestler. He pursued an acting and modeling career in Los Angeles for several years and then, in 1973 moved to Colorado, after his brother, John, drowned in an accident on the Arkansas River.
“What was left was a cabin my parents had built, and my mother gave it to Curtis,” Gordon Imrie said.
As a wrestler, his training regimen included running, and he once told the late Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen. “I got to like the road work, especially on our back roads.”
He was running in the woods when he met rancher Oscar Chapa, who had burros and partnered with runners to participate in pack-burro racing, the only sport indigenous to Colorado.
Chapa, who provided mules for racers, told him about Leadville’s pack burro race over Mosquito Pass. “You got the legs,” Chapa told him, “I got the ass.”
The idea interested Imrie, and he began participating in the races, eventually adopting wild burros from the Bureau of Land Management, and breeding them at his Little Menokin Ranch near Buena Vista.
He ran in every World Champion Pack Burro Race, a feature of Fairplay’s Burro Days, beginning in 1973, and was a three-time world champion.
Pack-burro racing requires a determined competitor with strong legs and a compliant burro.
Racers lead their donkeys 29 miles on a grueling course that starts at 10,000 feet, and climbs to 13,000, before beginning the descent, according to Hal Walter, a friend of Curtis, and fellow pack racer.
“You can’t ride,” Walter said, “you are running the whole time. The terrain is really rugged, its just a jumble of rocks.”
Curtis made his entry into Colorado’s political scene in 1992 with a write-in independent run for the state legislature.
He ran as a Democrat for the state house of representatives in 1994, losing to incumbent Republican Ken Chlouber, of Leadville, another pack-burro racer.
“That novelty — in the whole world, there are fewer than 100 pack-burro racers — attracted some major-league media attention, including a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal,” according to Quillen’s 2002 column.
In 2000, Imrie unsuccessfully ran in Colorado’s Third Congressional District against Republican incumbent Scott McInnis. Two years later, after Colorado’s congressional districts were redrawn, he ran in the Fifth District, against Republican incumbent Joel Hefley and lost again.
“He ran for office at least six times,” his brother said. “He was always a sort of Bernie Sanders kind of progressive. He had three main interests, donkeys, democracy and drama.”
His interest in burros brought him into contact with members of the animal-rights movement, and led him to enter politics, Gordon Imrie said.
Imrie championed the environment, equal treatment for all, and campaign finance reform, Walter said. “He was not a fan of money in politics. That was probably a big reason he never got a lot of votes because he didn’t take money from corporations.”
And though he left Los Angeles for Colorado, his interest in theater never flagged. He produced and directed several independent films, performed on stage both regionally, and on the east and west coasts, and had a bit part in one of the Star Trek movies, in which he played a Vulcan, Walter said.
His most recent acting role was portrayal of Mike Rust, a Mountain Bike Hall of Famer, and murder victim, in “The Rider and the Wolf,” a 2015 production by the Grit and Thistle Film Company.
Imrie also sat on the board of kHEN, a low-power community radio station in Salida, where he hosted a weekly radio show, “Poetry and Stories.”
The death of a man who regularly raced up steep mountain slopes came as a surprise to those who knew him.
But Imrie told friends that he had died on New Year’s Day 2005, when an 18 wheeler on Interstate 70 changed lanes, trapping his 1985 Pontiac Fiero below the semi’s trailer, according to Walter, who wrote an account of the incident for Colorado Central Magazine.
For almost a mile, the truck dragged the sleek sports car, until Imrie spun his wheel to the right and the vehicle spurted from beneath the truck.
“Everything suddenly stopped and all of a sudden it’s light and I’m hanging on this barrier with the car almost perpendicular to the pavement … I unstrapped the seatbelt, turned the engine off,” Imrie told Walter. “I dropped through what was left of the window and fell to my knees on the pavement.”
He was uninjured. “I died in that wreck,” he said, telling friends that he considered the experience a rebirth.
“Even if he only made it to 70, he probably feels he got bonus years,” Gordon Imrie said.
In addition to his brother, Imrie is survived by his life partner, Lindsey Lighthizer; nephews John Brookings Innes and Milo McIntosh Imrie; a grandniece, Grace Innes, and grandnephew, Joshua Innes.
Friends in Colorado are planning a memorial service for him, Walter said.
Updated Jan. 25, 2017, at 12:31 a.m. Because of a reporting error, Curtis Imrie’s partner’s name was misspelled. She is Lindsey Lighthizer.
