From looking at his picture, you may guess that sixty-two-year-old Mike is in the high-end hospitality business…..and you would be right.  He is handsome.  He is well-dressed. He is casual.  He is rather soft spoken.  And he is more than that.

His family moved to Colorado from Chicago when Mike was nine years old.  He is a dyed-in-the-fur Colorado Buff.  When he graduated from CU, he got a job in Aspen with the company that ran the Hotel Jerome among other local high end facilities.  He worked hard and learned the trade, moving up and being consistently hospitable.  

He was a runner who put in 35-40 miles a week on the roads.  Because he likes to climb while riding his trusty flat bar steed, he once was riding from Copper Mountain to Aspen and he had to practice the inverse of his profession and beg food from the motorists on the highway to gain the required calories to make it to the top of the pass. Fortunately a tourist was just as hospitable as he and stocked him up.  

Mike was the General Manager of the Denver Athletic Club for a few years and now is the GM at the Club at Rolling Hills on the side of South Table Mountain.  He cycles up  Lookout about three times a week.

But it gets better.  You cannot be more hospitable than being willing to possibly save someone’s life.  Recently a cyclist named Alex was descending Lookout Mountain when he “crashed into the guardrail and went flying over the barrier like a crash test dummy”.  His bike also made it over the guardrail and there was no evidence from the road that he had ever been there.  Fortunately for Alex, Mike saw it happen.  Without even considering that his bike may not be there when he he returned, Mike climbed down the steep grade to Alex and helped him back to the road where eventually the emergency folks could tend to him.  It doesn’t get more hospitable than that.

He also has a great story of a squirrel who ran along the guardrail next to him and launched itself toward his front wheel as he descended.  The squirrel survived, but Mike loves to tell the story of the kamikaze rodent who challenged him to a ‘winner take all’ match on Lookout.