Phil Dubitsky

Boulder had a variety of reputations which attracted my friends and I in the summer of 1970. There was the allure of the Rocky Mountains, lenient street life and a secretive government-affiliated university and the radical student movement which flourished because of this affiliation. My college friend, Bob, and I hitchhiked here after the Strawberry Fields festival at Toronto – looking to meet up with a third friend from school. He had preceded us by a few months and had left us with a phone number where we could reach him in Denver.

Sixteen years ago, Denver was a huge city in square miles. Being from a dense city East, I was lost the whole first week we spent there and felt real relief, when, instead of signing on to a construction crew, Lou, the man we came to find, joined Bob and I in the acid rain we were indulging in and dropped out to live with us in Boulder.

On the way west, we had been dropped off in Lawrence, Kansas, and found that town to be completely as wild as the campus at Carbondale, Illinois – drugs, sex, and rock and roll. I surreptitiously cashed all of my travelers checks in Lawrence and bought 160 cubes of really good LSD. We drove on to Boulder in Lou’s V.W. bus with Patty Stone, another of the R.I.T. drop out class and parked a block from the (University) Hill we had heard so much about.

Green summer city with long hair everywhere west of the campus. From this vantage, one could easily believe that the Boulder Valley was a new, revolutionary community – that there was no private property nor bankers to profit from it.

We got a good look at the wild deals going on in the street and then let a sugar cube melt in our mouths as we walked up the Hill to Beach Park. In a short time we were tripping and captivated by a group playing Frisbee. But then everyone’s attention was upstaged when two longhairs exploded, running from beneath the cover of a group of fir trees standing in the park’s southwest corner. Their panicked energy riveted our eyes, and the two young cops who followed the hippies from tree cover mad us all aware of our high-profile vulnerability here in the midst of what we thought was a drug-free zone. (Perhaps he meant a “cop-free zone?” – SG) The freaks made it for half a block before the cops brought them down on their faces with inter-collegiate style tackles. We watched the rough handcuffing and quickly agreed that we would be best off finding a spot west of town to accustom ourselves to this new city before we let our freak flags fly.

After a few days of poking around in the various roads etching west, we found ourselves welcomed into the seeming sanctuary of Dream Canyon. It seemed that the local landowners had made their peace with the swarm of longhairs and there was no mention of trespassing, which was the crime that ended in our mass arrest and removal from that glorious and spontaneous campground.

Early one morning, one of the half a dozen runaways who were camping with us who told me there were two cops down the hillside who had sent this kid named Fantasy up to inform us that we should all come down and be arrested for trespassing. They had driven up at sunrise and they told me we were breaking the law and pointed to a “No Trespassing” sign tacked high up on the tree we were under. The sign hadn’t been there through the previous weeks.

There were two cops and nineteen defendants. The runaways had time to pack and go further up the hill while the adults cheerily took their gear and met at the cop car to see about our arrest. I don’t know what the cops expected to do with us all, but they readily agreed to our following them to the jail in our vehicles. Among the rags and books and spiritual devices were nineteen sugar cubes and twenty tabs of speed.

One could only take four cubes, but we all had five of the speeders swallowed. The five days we spent behind bars were a very subjective time, but it went easily enough for me. (It was) my first jail time and Boulder County was a nice, civil place to do it. Finally, a lawyer hired by a father of one of the guys in our group exposed one of the arresting officers and their complicity in posting the “No Trespass” sign and we walked out of our day in court and regrouped, feeling higher than when we had gone in.

In retrospect, I realize that Boulder had always been a property protective community. History here has always been bloody, fueled by the original discovery of gold near where the city of Denver is today that led to the banishment and massacre of the Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians who held title to this land before their tragic demise, ordered and orchestrated by Governor Evans, for whom a mountain was named. Incidentally, a mountain was also named for the slain chief of the Arapahoe, Chief Niwot, one of the earliest victims of the codes of business and property which grasps this valley and the people in it in a choke hold of power.

Copyright 2026 S.Byron Gassaway