High, Holy, and Half-Crazy

Colorado has always been just a little too much. Too high, too proud, too wild, too sure it has life figured out. From gold-rush fever and silver-boom scandals to ski-town glamour and wildfire panic, High, Holy, and Half-Crazy: An Irreverent History of Colorado takes you on a fast, funny, and unfiltered tour through the Centennial State’s most spectacular contradictions.

Discover how Denver rose from a muddy camp of gamblers and grifters, how Colorado Springs became America’s evangelical epicenter, and how mountain towns traded ore carts for chairlifts without missing a beat. Meet the miners, dreamers, hippies, and hustlers who built paradise at 5,000 feet and then spent the next hundred years trying to keep it from burning down.

With sharp humor and clear-eyed compassion, Jordan Blake Carter digs into the myths that define Colorado, from frontier freedom to modern reinvention, revealing a place where ambition always outruns common sense and beauty always wins in the end.

Whether you are a lifelong Coloradan, a curious transplant, or just someone who loves a good story told with wit and bite, this is Colorado as you’ve never seen it before: beautiful, brutal, hopeful, and hilariously human.