Monica LaSalle, Peak to Peak. Ever wonder who that guy is? The one with all the different jars of honey on display, making sales out of his car in Boulder Canyon, on Highway 119, and other seemingly random locations. So have I, and when I got the chance to sit down with him, I discovered someone much more than just a honey salesman. 

Sitting across from me at my favorite interview haunt was a boy and his canoe, plain and simple. Don Willoughby is his name, and he grew up in Ontario surrounded by 180 miles of rivers and a lake. He got a canoe before he even got a bicycle, and with it he explored with freedom and abandon in a carefree time when children headed out to play for the day and didn’t return until dark. 

Once he started high school, he discovered his brain doesn’t work like other people’s brains after being given an IQ test that he passed in a unique manner. Soon after, he chose to follow an engineering background that led him to acquire work as a steam engineer for breweries, wineries and restaurants. 

Ever eager to indulge his engineering mind, combined with a constant craving for adventure, Don soon started flying planes. He earned a private pilot license and later booked enough hours to get his commercial pilot license. But Don soon realized that he had no appreciation for flying in bad weather, so he bought a two-week vacation ticket to Hawaii in search of new experiences. 

He arrived on Maui, bought himself a bike and a cane fishing pole and proceeded to immerse himself in subsisting off the land, an existence he loved so much he sold the return portion of his trip ticket. Soon thereafter, he met a man who operated a commercial fishing business out of Alaska. He invited Don to join his crew, but when he went to find the man, he had no luck. He decided to take a job as a cook on another boat where he soon discovered the maintenance was left up to pure positive thinking and dream catchers as lucky charms in the engine room. This prompted him to take over the maintenance using his background and skill as an engineer, and the next thing he knew, he had developed a reputation around the Alaskan fishing industry as the guy in the know. Realizing the connection with flying, Don decided to pursue working on boats commercially, becoming a fisherman and later working research vessels all along the western coastline from Alaska to Mexico and Brazil. 

All this time, Don has been telling me stories at a very high rate of speed, more stories than I could hope to have space for in this article, and at the speed of which he seems to have lived them, crammed into a short amount of time in his life. He seems to be like a ball of energy, describing a voracious appetite for learning and experiences that has taken him on adventures all over the world. As my typing fingers struggle to keep up with him, he slows down a little to begin telling me of an experience that was profound for him, and as it turns out, the world at large. 

In 2002, he was called to assist with the Prestige Oil Spill, off the coast of Galicia, Spain, based on credentials he had earned attending hazardous material cleanup training at Roosevelt Rhodes Naval Base, in Puerto Rico. One of the largest environmental disasters in the world, the tanker carrying 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil was floundering with potential structural failure but denied access to port in Spain. The tanker soon split in half, Don says, because it was loaded wrong to begin with. As he describes in further detail how he and a 500 man crew with five ships retrieved the remainder of the oil from the ship at unprecedented depths of 3850 meters or under 400 bar of water pressure, he adds in a sprinkle of his own political hypothesis as to why such a disaster could have come to pass. 

Come to find out, Don has actually been on the ballot for two Senatorial races here in Colorado, one as a write in. He says that he wants to spark people to begin talking about the hard things, as he believes himself to be a truth teller. “Whose truth?” I find myself compelled to ask. “The given truth,” he says, explaining that he wants to expose the myths in life about things such as money, religion and gender. He wants such things to stop being stigmatized. He calls it the Long Con…and speaks of generalizing as a treacherous way of thinking and he wants people to think and not accept the model that exists. 

Fundamentally, Don says, he believes that everyone should have a place where they can go and be whether they want to participate in America or not, and that there is enough surplus in this world and our economy where people can live their passions rather than put all their energy into earning a living. He says, “I’m not really interested in winning an election, but rather in sparking the conversations.” 

Twenty minutes later, I finally realize we had been going off on tangents of sociopolitical theory and steer the conversation back to bees and honey. And the man who once decided to pick up another side project “real quick while he was there studying to be a Child Specialist” at a monastery in Tuscany that specialized in honey bees, olive groves and parasites. He took this newly acquired knowledge back with him to Colorado where he set up camp in Broomfield, Sugarloaf and Nederland and started raising his own bees, making olive oil with contacts in the Sonoma Valley, and maple syrup in contract with Anderson Syrup, in Wisconsin. Willoughby Specialty Foods, or Willoughby Honey is Don’s latest, greatest project and can be found locally in the Nederland Co-op.

 Don also works at Eldora in the Ignite Program and has worked in the Ski School. Is there anything this man hasn’t done? That, he says, is what he is determined to find out. He is on the lookout for the next great adventure as we speak, actually. Look for him on the roadside sometime and give a shout out. Just talking to Don is an adventure. 

Interested in being covered in the Mountain Folk Tales column? Know someone you would like to suggest? Email us at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the July 4, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)