Ahh, this explains it. This site has been leased back to AT&T from American Tower. We later discovered from "Gary" that this site handles the telephone service for the park rangers and AT&T seemed to have forgotten about that when they sold it to AmTower. One day the phones went out and there was an "oops" heard round the nation, so AT&T got AmTower to lease the site back to them and turned the path up again from Denver to here for phone service.

We haven't gotten to Badger Mountain yet, be we figure it'll be live too. It's not hard to imagine that Salida and the other small towns in the southern Rockies still get their phone via microwave. The populations of those towns haven't changed since the 50's and it has to be expensive to run fiber through the mountains. We can't think of any reason AT&T would have to cancel the route.