SILVERTON — Every weekend, a Colorado veteran navigates his heavy duty ATV up 3,000 feet of a rocky, twisted incline to Engineer Pass just to change out an American flag.

At 12,800 feet flying over the San Juan Mountain range, the banner doesn’t wave as much as it strains and slaps.

On July 4, Jimmy Keene II saw what had become a knotted and torn Engineer Pass flag and committed to being its keeper.

For veterans, allowing a damaged flag to fly is an unspoken transgression.

“Last week, the wind snapped the flagpole in half,” he said as he gunned the SXS engine over a deep puddle that soon will be winterized into a sheet of ice.

It’s hard to imagine that on Oct. 5, while Colorado’s front range sweltered under record-breaking heat, wind chills at the peak of the Alpine Loop got down to 6 degrees.

Keene brought clamps and a cordless drill and repaired the flagpole and hoisted a fresh flag in time for a sunrise salute.

“I cry driving back down,” he said. “I get home and feel better.”

This is therapy for a man who suffered from such severe war-born PTSD, he said he lost his way.

However, Keene found it back in the simple seclusion of Silverton — population 713, which has only one paved road in and out of town.

“I was on six medications when I moved here,” he said.

Not long after making the former mining town home, the single dad chucked the pills.

Today, he and his 14-year-old champion snowboard racer son survive on protein shakes, home-made dad-dinners and chocolate milk.

Keene’s story

Keene was a 90’s era signal unit communications specialist who deployed with special operations soldiers.

Two of those men died and a dozen others were wounded in one “incident,” which haunts Keene as a survivor.

“I’ve been told multiple times by multiple people it’s not my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it, but my mind has convinced me that it was,” he said.

He started replacing the flags July 4.

Last weekend’s change-out was the 15th this year.

When people on his Facebook page realized what he was doing, they asked to be involved, so he started wrapping the Engineer Pass-blown flags into tight military-style triangles.

He sends each one for $32, the cost of the flag and postage.

When The Denver Gazette asked why they wanted the worn-out Old Glories, several sponsors wrote back.

From Gidget Kehlenbrink: “The San Juans are everything to me and the flag that flew in the air over those mountains of my family is precious.”

From Becky Forsyth from Yellowjacket, Colorado: “Oh my heart! The flag represents those who serve in our military to fight for us and our families. It is the blanket of all that America should represent.”

Laura Tippy, of Montrose, correlated the flag to her brother’s cancer battle as a “symbol of strength, resilience and freedom.”

She is framing her flag to give to him.

Alexandria, Louisiana’s Carla Whitestone, a Desert Storm veteran whose father was shot and survived Vietnam, said, “Our flag is displayed on our fireplace mantel to look at every day.”

San Juan Mountain adventures

In October 2023, Keene started a non-profit which offers outdoor trips to suffering veterans.

The Facebook page, San Juan Mountain Adventures already has 58,000 followers, an unheard-of number of supporters. The 50-year-old soldier’s vision is to create a 30-room healing center “to replicate what the mountains did for me.”

In the country’s largest analysis of veteran suicide, in 2014, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs reviewed 55 million veterans’ records since 1979 and estimated that an average of 20 veterans a day died taking their own lives.

Keene thinks that, with his therapeutic approach, that number can be whittled down to 19, which means 365 lives saved every year.

The tear running down his cheek is not from the cold wind.

“Psychologically, my mind is trying to make up for the event years ago,” Keene said. “I try to live my life the best I can because they can’t.”