Hotchkiss, Colorado

“We Buy Hides” was the sign that drew me to the place rather than curious looking piles of junk scattered over nearly an acre out in front of the Trade-N-Post in Hotchkiss, Colorado.

It was shortly after hunting season and I had a deer hide that I would normally have thrown away. Why not sell it? Many times had I driven by this cluttered place in Hotchkiss, but never had I stopped. Now there was a reason to.

“Three bucks,” the big man said, as he examined the hide. Not much I thought, but still more than what the dump would pay. He tossed the hide nonchalantly into the back of an old-pickup truck full of the same and handed me $3.00.

Curious about this place that to me was an eyesore in a small town, I started asking questions.

“What all do you have here?”

“Oh, from this to that,” he replied. “And if I don’t have what you’re looking for, give me until 30 minutes after sundown and I’ll get it.” He laughed and quickly added that he had never stolen a thing in his life and wasn’t about to start now.

Larry “Rip” Rippy opened the Trade-N-Post in 1982. Built out of three houses that he salvaged piece by piece, it took a full year for him to build it. Rip said he knew what he wanted and he found what was needed to build the structure without having to buy any of it.

The Trade-N-Post was started to supplement Rip’s monthly Social Security disability checks. “It doesn’t make much money, but it pays the rent,” Rip said.

Prior to the creation of the Trade-N-Post and moving to Hotchkiss, Rip worked in the oilfields for 25 years, “doin’ everything,” and was part of history working on the first and deepest, cable tool hole in the country.

Back then, the most accurate way to tell how the well drilling was going was to hold the turning cable in your hand and feel the progress, “knowing in your head” from experience, Rip said.

Before the oilfields, Rip trapped, traded and bought furs with his father’s Craig Hide and Fur Company in Craig, Colorado. The building that housed the business was a historic landmark in the Craig area.

“The DRG&W Railroad tore the building down” in the late’60s because of a missed lease payment. “If you were a minute past midnight on your payment, it was too late,” Rip recalled.

On any given day, Rip and the ever-present Ben, “part fox and part somethin’ else,” can be seen sitting comfortably in the late afternoon sun on the porch of the Post, waving as familiar townsfolk pass by.

Besides trading the usual (and unusual) chairs, lamps, hubcaps and refrigerators, Rip is also a craftsman. One of the things he makes is earrings from the ivory bugling teeth of bull elk. And speaking of bulls (the slow, domestic bull),

Rip makes very unique walking canes from an entirely different part of the bull. The reproductive organ of the bull is stretched and straightened out, then dried into hard leather, and coated with polyurethane. That is just the beginning, however.

Adding pieces of silver, authentic Indian arrowheads and inlaid turquoise, along with your initials if desired, Rip builds a very unique (to say the least) walking stick, if not a piece of art. Depending on what is mounted on it, a cane can sell for as high as $200

and I am sure you would be one of a select few to own one of them!

Rip is a generous and giving man. The afternoon I was there speaking with him, he asked how tall I was. “Six-two,” I replied. “Here,” he said, handing me one rather long cane. “It’s yours.”

Rip sitting on his porch at the Trade-N-Post

One Christmas, Rip was selling trees out in front of the Trade-N- Post. A little neighborhood boy would stop by each day after school and look longingly at the trees and then walk across the street to his home. Rip knew the boy’s family had no money to purchase a tree for they were quite poor.

On Christmas Eve the boy stopped by as he had every day, only this time he came up to Rip and pointing to a particularly handsome tree, asked, “How much do you want for that one?”

“How much do you have in your pocket?” Rip asked.

“Nuthin,” replied the downcast boy.

“That’s exactly how much I want,” Rip said. ‘That kid’s feet didn’t touch the ground as he dragged the tree home,” reflected Rip, his voice cracking and tears welling up in his eyes.

There was also the time a woman came by and wanted to trade a nanny goat for a wooden desk so her daughter would have something to do her homework on.

“I don’t want to go into the stock yard business,” Rip said, turning down the goat. He let her have the desk for nothing. A half hour later, a friend of Rip’s came by and chastised Rip because he could have sold the goat for $25. But Rip had no regrets. “If I had a choice, I’d do all the things I’ve done the same way again,” he said.

Motioning for me to follow him, Rip said he was going to show me his “office.” Leading me across the yard to an old outhouse, Rip stopped and with a twinkle in his eye said, “Go ahead and open it.” After all I had seen since arriving here, I was a bit cautious as I pulled the door open.

Inside was a stuffed Halloween mask with a hat on it, peering out of the commode at me.

“Couple of days after I put this out here, one of the town council members came by and said I couldn’t have an outhouse. We argued a while and she mentioned town codes and what not, and then I brought her out here, told her to open the door and showed this to her,” smiled Rip. His office still stands.

Back inside the Post, Rip displayed an authentic Confederate $20 bill printed in 1861. He found it in the wall of one old houses when they demolished it.

You name it, Rip’s got it, either in the yard or inside the Trade-N-Post.

Motioning to three canes leaning against the bleached skull of a cow, Rip said with a grin, “Now you can say you’ve seen both ends of the True West.”

John McEvoy