After a couple of rounds and a live tune or ten in a good bar, you have no idea how long you’ve been there. The moment you walk into a great bar? You’re left wondering how long it’s been there – suspended in space and time, ancient and ageless, familiar and foreign. It’s folkloric.
There was a certain magic spiraling through Sphinx Park’s legendary Bucksnort Saloon on June 10. Sure, the full Buck Moon cast an ethereal light on everything. But tricks of the moon these were not: The Bucksnort was, against all odds, open for its first service in three years – and, as at all great bars, the night buzzed with the promise of the new within the comfort of the old.
Wedged in the runoff between Schuyler Gulch and Elk Creek in the Jefferson County foothills just outside of Pine, the Bucksnort started out as the single-room Sphinx Park Mercantile in 1919. As is often the case with ramshackle high-country construction, various structures got grafted onto the thing over time – morphing it into a local square-dance venue, then a live music hall, then a classic bar and restaurant, until, by the 1970s, it had come into its own as the Bucksnort Saloon. Then came a series of ownership changes…