John Scarffe, Gilpin County. Ron Engels and Zane Laubhan of Central City have been married for 25 years and first met in 1994 on Christmas Eve at Indian Springs in Idaho Springs when they felt an immediate connection.

Zane had just returned from Australia doing emergency management training, and Ron admired his tan lines. After meeting and talking, Zane said he had to go pick up his boss at the airport who was flying in from Las Vegas, and it was snowing. Though Ron gave him his number, he thought that was a great excuse and expected never to hear from him again. They did connect again, though, and they celebrate December 24 as one of their anniversaries. 

To get married, they did paperwork in Colorado but didn’t know if it would hold up in court. Then, in 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court recognized gay marriages, and so they went to Iowa, where Ron is from, and were married. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that gay marriages were legal. 

Zane was born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Denver and grew up in Steamboat Springs. When he was 13, the family moved to Lakewood, Colorado, and he graduated from Lakewood High School.

He graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in environmental public health in 1989 and has always been a paramedic. He is almost the longest licensed paramedic in the state.

Ron and Zane moved to Central City together in 2000. They lived on Spring Street for a year in a basement apartment. After a year, they found the historic home on Casey Street. They originally had a five year plan for the rebuilding, but that was 20 years ago. 

In March 2000, Zane became director of the Gilpin County Ambulance Authority, and he was appointed Gilpin County Coroner in 2005. The previous coroner had just quit and threw her keys on the desk, he said.

The Gilpin County Commissioners appointed him as coroner, and he has run successfully since then. Ron said Zane has brought him to his cases, and he has learned a lot about advanced life support. 

“It is endlessly fascinating. It doesn’t take long at our dinner conversations to turn to dead bodies,” Ron said.

Ron grew up in Vincent, Iowa, a small town near Fort Dodge. He went to the University of Iowa and then went into the army. He was trained as a voice intercept operator and worked as a signal analyst and then in the early 1980s was in Panama.

“It was an interesting job,” Ron said. Zane said part of the reason he was good at the job because he could speak Spanish.

After finishing his degree at the University of Iowa, Ron worked in Public Radio at Pierceville, Kansas, and lived in Garden City. He worked for a “do everything” radio station with call letters KANZ in Garden City and KZNA in Hays from 1988 to 1989.

Ron moved to Denver in 1995 and worked for Denver Public Schools (DPS) as a main frame operator. He remembered that the computers were water-cooled, and the last thing his boss did on Friday afternoons before they left for the weekend was to top off the reservoirs for the computers.

Ron had several jobs in technology with DPS and spent the last 10 years or more building a data warehouse for the district. In addition to working at DPS, Ron agreed to run for the Central City Council. 

The Friday before the filing deadline, a neighbor approached him and said, “You are running for the Council. Here is the application with one signature, and you just need 24 more.”

Ron worried about whether to run or not but decided to run and made it to the courthouse by 4:30 p.m. with the necessary signatures, and the rest is history. 

Ron served on the Central City Historic Preservation Committee and on the City Council for six years. He was elected mayor in 2010 and served for six years. He said they tried to do the nuts and bolts and the fundamentals of good governance and tried to make progress bringing in businesses to the city. Ron was elected as a Gilpin County Commissioner and served in four years at that position, after quitting his job with DPS.

Regarding what they have in common, Ron said that Zane is a hunter and goes to the Flattops Wilderness in Colorado hunting for elk every year. Sometimes Ron goes and sometimes he doesn’t.

“Being from Steamboat Springs, hunting is what life was,” Zane said. Also growing up in Steamboat Springs, Zane learned to ski. Every Friday afternoon, the school students would go skiing. Zane said a lot of the skiers wore coordinated outfits, but he just skied in jeans. Other skiers would ask him if he fell down wouldn’t his jeans get wet, and he said, what? Fall down?

Zane also ran a marathon at Flattops. As an Eagle Scout, he earned Chief of Lodge in the Order of the Arrow and conducted community service projects such as cutting down pine beetle trees.

During one campout at the Tahosa Scout Campground south of Estes Park, they had three unexpected inches of snow and scouts from the south had never seen snow before. The southerners didn’t make it to breakfast. 

As a scout, Zane also worked for two years at the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. They were aware of bears, there, but food and candy bars snuck in the scout’s backpacks was the usual problem.

Ron grew up in Iowa where it was flat and never learned how to ski. He said the house now is the glue that binds them together.

Ron said they are on their 20th year of the five-year plan to restore the house. The last time before they owned it, any major maintenance had been on the house was in 1946, when they put in plumbing.

The couple has had to rebuild it from the foundation up and had to jack up the foundation to begin with. “It was a real effort and a labor of love,” Ron said.

The house includes a large formal dining room with an historic piano still there from when the house was built in 1877, a formal sitting room, large kitchen, four sleeping rooms and four bathrooms. Each room is decorated beautifully and historically. While renovating the kitchen, they discovered a mine shaft in the back, and appraisers agreed that it contained gold.

Zane and Ron covered the shaft with a pantry, that they fill with delicious canning items including chilis, beets and vegetables, they put up themselves. The house looks complete, but they say they still have work to do.

They also will continue the work they have done on behalf of Gilpin County. 

(Originally published in the February 11, 2021, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)