{"id":9778,"date":"2014-02-18T10:29:51","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T16:29:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=9778"},"modified":"2014-02-18T10:29:51","modified_gmt":"2014-02-18T16:29:51","slug":"the-wondrous-zina-lahr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=9778","title":{"rendered":"The Wondrous Zina Lahr"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Zina Lahr was found dead outside of Ouray, Colorado, in November. <\/p>\n

The mayor was the last person to see Zina Nicole Lahr alive. Sometime in the early afternoon of Wednesday, November 20, Bob Risch, a 73-year-old native of Ouray, Colorado, and its mayor from 2007 until this January, noticed the colorful and well-known local strolling east. She was dressed in pants and a light jacket and was wearing Vibram Five Fingers toe shoes instead of winter boots.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe saw her going down the alley just to the east of our property,\u201d recalls Risch\u2019s wife, Karen. \u201cIt was starting to snow, and it was cold. He didn\u2019t even tell me, because, of course, we didn\u2019t know anything was wrong until her mother called about 6:30 and said that Zina hadn\u2019t come home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bob and Karen, neighbors of the Lahrs, had watched Zina grow up. When she was ten, Zina had helped Karen train her search dog, Lyra, a shepherd-Labrador mix, to find people in the mountains. Karen would dig a snow cave, and Zina would climb in with a beacon and radio. \u201cShe said once that she loved having Lyra\u2019s paws come through the snow when the dog found her,\u201d Karen says.<\/p>\n

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Zina had been heading toward Cascade Falls, a popular hiking destination on the Perimeter Trail, a four-year-old footpath that rings the town. Ouray, population 1,000, is in southwestern Colorado, where it sits at the head of a box canyon on the Uncompahgre River, right where U.S. 550\u2014the most dangerously avalanche-prone stretch of highway in the U.S.\u2014descends from Red Mountain Pass. A Main Street billboard for a summer jeep-touring company calls Ouray The Little Switzerland of America. Above town, the peaks and ridgelines of the San Juan Mountains rise so abruptly that their summits are hidden from view by shoulders of ore-rich rock that still keeps many local miners employed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore we had ice climbing, if you came into Ouray in the middle of the winter, it was an incredibly dead place,\u201d says Bob Risch. \u201cAt 8 p.m. on Main Street, you were more likely to see deer than people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zina with a sea monster she called “Catalyst.” Photo: Courtesy of the Lahr family<\/p>\n

After the Ouray Ice Park formally opened in 2001, the town cemented its position as the sport\u2019s American mecca. Since then, more motels and restaurants have sprouted up, along with new trails that traverse the steep hillsides where Zina hiked most days. On November 20, she snapped some photos with her phone and picked a small bit of moss for her grandmother Patricia that was later found in her pants pocket.<\/p>\n

\u201cZina would go out on an adventure every day, and she would get some little piece of nature\u2014a stone, a fossil, beautiful fall leaves,\u201d says her mother, Cindy Lahr. Cindy commuted to work as the office manager at a dental practice in Montrose, 40 miles north. \u201cThey would discuss this little memorabilia that Zina would bring back from her adventure,\u201d says Cindy. \u201cAnd they would weave it into a story that they were going to write together.\u201d<\/p>\n

At some point on the 20th, Zina climbed above the Perimeter Trail, possibly to get a better view of town and its surrounding peaks. Then she slipped. Or rockfall hit her from above, crushing her skull. Nobody is quite sure what happened, but the police ruled out foul play. \u201cFrom what I understand of the coroner\u2019s report, she was not aware of her impending death, so she didn\u2019t have any adrenaline in her system,\u201d says Sean DeLand, 33, a Telluride-based television producer and musician whom Zina had seen on and off since 2012. Friends and family take solace in the likelihood that she didn\u2019t bleed or suffer much.<\/p>\n

After she died, a five-minute video surfaced of Zina standing in her bedroom in her grandmother\u2019s house, which had shelves crammed with robots she\u2019d built and other art projects. In the video, she explains that she has \u201ccreative compulsive disorder\u201d and can\u2019t stop making things\u2014especially robots. The video was the first hint at what Zina was: an impossibly innocent and gifted eccentric on the verge of breaking out in the world of animatronics and stop motion. It was an audition for a Los Angeles\u2013based reality show called Jim Henson\u2019s Creature Shop Challenge, a SyFy channel program premiering March 25 that\u2019s sort of like Project Runway for animatronics artists. She\u2019d turned down a spot on the show in order to move home and care for her grandmother, who\u2019d been diagnosed with lung cancer in September.<\/p>\n

The clip, called \u201cThe Work of Zina Nicole Lahr,\u201d went viral and has since been viewed half a million times on Vimeo. There was something about this girl in steampunk chic\u2014with peacock-feather hair falls and aviator goggles always perched on her forehead\u2014that struck people as incredibly genuine. In the video, Zina, looking like a Jules Verne\u2013era tinkerer with some Mad Max thrown in, says she considers herself a canvas as much as anything else.<\/p>\n

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A Reddit group generated hundreds of comments, most of them from people who wanted to understand how someone like Zina could even be real. \u201cWhere the hell does a person like this come from?\u201d wrote one. \u201cI think most people, myself included, eventually become jaded and lose that sense of wonder we once had when we were children. Based on the little bit I\u2019ve seen and read, though, it seems she managed to keep that, which is incredible to me. I feel like there is an incredible lesson to be learned from the way she appears to have lived her life, but I can\u2019t grasp at what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few less charitable viewers wondered whether drugs or alcohol might have been a factor in Zina\u2019s death, since she appeared underweight and looked as if she\u2019d just come back from Burning Man.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, no. Zina\u2019s never been there,\u201d says Stormy Pyeatte, one of her childhood friends and the filmmaker who shot the video. \u201cThis girl\u2019s never had a drop of alcohol in her life. She\u2019s never driven a car\u2014but she could take a car engine apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Zina had a secret, it was virtue rather than vice: Like many of the people who surrounded her, she was a lifelong evangelical Christian, deeply spiritual and devoted to Jesus, though she was not very dogmatic or political. \u201cOne of my buddies who I play music with didn\u2019t realize until after her funeral that religion or Christianity or faith was so important to Zina,\u201d says Sean, who had first gotten to know Zina on Facebook because they share similar beliefs.<\/p>\n

Before her death, Zina had begun to travel away from home for the first time, and it seemed as if life was just beginning for her. \u201cI realize that this body has found its way back to Colorado,\u201d she wrote in a philosophical ramble on her blog, Normally Odd in August 2013. \u201cThis is my third venture back to this base since I started my travels to California a little over a year ago for what started as a simple adventure of delivering wedding rings, and turned into an odyssey without a definitive end.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Lahrs moved to Ouray from College Station, Texas, in 1987. Zina was born in 1990. Her father left the family when she was seven, and she was raised and homeschooled by her mother and her mother\u2019s parents. Zina\u2019s grandfather, Keith, was an agricultural research scientist at Texas A&M. \u201cMy dad\u2019s specialty was wheat,\u201d says Cindy. \u201cHe developed some wheat strains with resistance to drought and disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

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