Dick Osterweil
Obituaries
Vail Valley Times page 6 - May 21, 1997
Dick Osterweil dies after being bucked off a horse
Often enough it's said of people that they've died doing what they like best. Even fleeting acquaintances of Dick Osterweil will know that to be true in his case. He died last week at the age of 70 after being bucked off a horse in Edwards.
The particulars are that he was trying to help break a horse at the Berry Creek Equestrian Center. There's some speculation that he may have been hit by a stroke of even a heart attack before the horse bucked him, because it wasn't the type of buck he normally couldn't handle. At any rate, he hit the ground, breaking his neck the same way Christopher Reeve did. Fellow riders immediately rushed to the scene and administered CPR. He was taken to Vail, then flown to Denver. He never did regain consciousness though, and life support was pulled Saturday morning.
Dick's former life was in New Jersey, where he was a wine distributor. Later, he was in Houston, and from there conducted fishing expeditions to Colorado. After a broken marriage, he moved to Colorado permanently.
He was in love with the Rocky Mountains, it's fair to say and thought that the best way to see the countryside was from a saddle. He often boasted of having once put on 3,000 trail miles in one year.
He wore a broad-brimmed Western-style hat pulled down low and often enough looked to be layered with dust.
During most of the last 10 or so years he was a regular at meeting concerned with use of public lands, and give half a chance could be expected to offer his point of views on those public lands. He felt strongly, for example, that the area along Meadow Creek in the Eagles Nest Wilderness Area should be logged. Too, he often expounded his perspective as a horseman, calling for more access to public hands. He had three horses, and curiously each one had four legs. He was the sort who could talk a leg off a horse.
Frequently he was accompanied by his son, Jim, who had parallel in interests. In fact the two at times seemed inseparable.
Dick Osterweil had interests beyond horses, of course. For a couple of years his "project" was biomass recycling. He thought that building bricks could be created by using sewage and other materials, and he did a great deal of work and crunched lots of numbers.
He may have been on to something there, perhaps 20 years ahead of his time. The question was whether he could execute things.
He faithfully volunteered for Cowboy Dreams. Contributions in his memory can be made to Cowboy Dreams at Box 61, Edwards, 81632
