Alferd Packer Restaurant & Grill may seem like a misspelling of perhaps a wealthy donor to the CU campus, but the actual story of the name comes from a famous cannibal in Colorado. Students were asked to name the dining hall when it was being built, and the name that won in a landslide from morbid college humor was Alferd Packer. Packer was searching for gold in Breckenridge like many others in the 1800s, and banded himself with a small group of men that he didn’t know by lying and saying that he knew the area well (he did not). It was written that Packer was a horrible traveling companion... Read More

People eating people is messy business. No surprise there. The Walking Dead, for example, paints a serious portrait of life in a world overrun by flesh hungry citizens—from the psychology of survival, to logistics of remaining ahead of a horde. Boulder and CU-Boulder take a different approach. We’re not talking zombies, of course, but something no less unbelievable, and a lot more real. Gold and silver were kings of the Four Corners region in the late 19th century. Add homesteaders traveling westward, as well as a hearty sense of wildness, and you got the bedrock of the Wild West. Alferd Packer... Read More