A Lifetime at Vermejo: Meet Roy Pillmore

3 days ago

2 min read

When Preserved comes to Pueblo this week, audiences will have the chance to meet someone whose connection to Vermejo stretches back nearly his entire life.

Roy Pillmore first arrived at Vermejo when he was about a year old. His father, a government geologist, spent his summers working there, and every year, as soon as school let out in Lakewood, Colorado, the Pillmore family packed up and headed south.

“The day that we got out of school, we moved to Vermejo, stayed there all summer long until the day before school started,” Roy remembers. “We did this until I was 17.”

Those summers shaped him. Roy went on to become a geologist himself, eventually returning to the region after college to work at the coal mine near Raton. Today, after a lifetime spent studying, working on, restoring, and exploring this landscape, he is back at Vermejo once again.

Roy will join us in person for the Preserved screenings in Pueblo this week at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center. We caught up with him to talk about a lifetime connected to this remarkable place.

Did you like spending your summers at Vermejo?

Oh, I love it today. I loved it then. I’ve loved it my entire life. It was the best place to grow up in the world. I had wonderful friends, got to see lots of country and lots of different lifestyles, lots of people, lots of wildlife, gorgeous country.

How did you eventually make your way back?

I moved back to Raton and worked at the coal mine in 1984, right after college. I worked at the coal mine for 15 years, and I was able to do my part to not only extract a valuable mineral—coal—but I was also able to do the reclamation and the revegetation to put it back to the country that I’ve loved all my life. It’s a lot of success. I’m very proud of that. Nine years ago, I returned to Vermejo once again. It’s the best final gig you can imagine.

As a geologist, what do you find most interesting at Vermejo?

On Vermejo, the only geologic feature that is dinosaur-related might be the K-T boundary. By education, I’m a geologist, and that’s what I was doing professionally. But I love archaeology, and I’ve found some wonderful artifacts, and I look forward to sharing those.

Roy raised an orphaned mountain lion cub, as well as a bear cub, in his extraordinary life.

What do those artifacts tell you about the people who lived at Vermejo a thousand years ago?

They had a hard life. And they also had a very good life. It was all they knew.

For Roy, Vermejo isn’t simply a place he studies or a place he works. It is a landscape he has watched change over more than seven decades—and one he has had a hand in restoring along the way. Join us in Pueblo this week for Preserved and hear more from Roy in person as we explore Vermejo’s extraordinary landscape, its history, and what its restoration can teach us about the future.