"You gotta be going to Walden to get to Walden," says former Walden Mayor, Kyle Fliniau of this very rural community in Jackson County, Colorado. "And some folks in Walden like it that way." He underscored the out-of-way location of this town of just over 700 people on the Colorado/Wyoming border. In the last ten years, there have been only six building permits taken out for new construction on single family homes. At the same time, more than a third of the town's men list construction as their trade. The closest hospital is nearly 60 miles away-over Rabbit Ears Pass in one direction and into Wyoming in another. When Fliniau applied to the Caring for Colorado Foundation for a grant he said, "The construction of this facility will help bring quality health care to a

rural community that often gets ignored." Fliniau said the idea for this clinic was born seven or eight years ago out of a master health care plan created when he was mayor of the town. Fliniau and his collaborative partners of the North Park Medical Clinic, the North Park Hospital District, the Town of Walden and Jackson County raised $2.3 million to build the facility, and Fliniau became the project director. He continued with that title even after he was term-limited from the mayor's office.

"Caring for Colorado was certainly the catalyst," to getting the money raised, said Fliniau. "Were it not for the new facility, Walden might still be operating out of its old clinic. Shoot, it's nothing but a 20 by 40 foot cinder block building," he said. Prior to the plan for a clinic, emergency ambulances were housed in a shed off a county road, and nurses worked from two closets expanded to receive patients.

Now, Fliniau says they are meeting their goals in their master plan for health care one by one. He says the clinics' tenants will include Jackson County Nursing Services, Jackson County Social Services, Colorado West Mental Health and Yampa Valley Physical Therapists. Construction of the new clinic is providing the space and the opportunity to integrate medical and mental health, and the clinic was built with the notion that they may some day expand services. "Equally as exciting," Fliniau says, "the new facility has been helpful in recruiting a part time doctor; a woman who grew up in the area and will spend part of her time providing care to people at the North Park Medical Clinic. Jackson County lost its long time family physician of 40 years, and has not had a resident physician since the late 1980s.