They’re wonderful wooden giants, filled with personality, most with touching history tributes to their out-of-the-way home areas, all recycled and environmentally perfect. And two of the beloved Thomas Dambo trolls are in special sites in Colorado, including Victor.

Famed Danish artist Dambo creates character trolls worldwide, working with communities and volunteers who turn into recycled-wood-pallet preparers and rock gatherers for the art teams. In his video he says, “We don’t need to drown in trash. We can build beautiful things.”

There are more than 150 of his recycled sculptures hidden in nature in 20 countries, and Trolls of America is Dambo’s dream of one or more in every state. These public art projects are commissioned by cities, community organizations, botanic gardens and more, and they’re tucked away throughout nature as sources of inspiration. The pieces cost between $50,000 and $500,000 depending on design, size and location, labor and travel.

Travelers can follow a TrollMap and join fan clubs in search of the hidden gems in rugged locations, sharing social media with hints about any difficult sites, all of them on difficult-to-traverse trails and hikes to settings with names and histories Dambo knows they’ll appreciate. There’s glee as trollsters compete online to find the most sculptures. (trollmap.com)

North Carolina boasts the most trolls in a U.S. state, with seven members of one old-time Southern troll family and different family members in three cities: Raleigh, High Point and Charlotte. Before that, Maine and Washington were tops with six trolls.

The two Colorado trolls are prize finds for Dambo Troll hunters. Rita the Rock Planter is quietly at home in the midst of the famous Teller County mountain mining area where many millions of dollars in gold were extracted. Rita arrived in August 2023 with a very special mission of fixing some of the pitted, dug-out mining areas left behind.

Rita is 21 feet tall, standing high on Little Grouse Mountain near both Victor and Cripple Creek in beautiful mountain scenery.

Dambo often explains his creations in verse and here is what he wrote about Rita:

“A hundred suns is how long a nap takes for the trolls.

When Rita woke again, her mountainside was full of holes

The humans must have dug them in their search for shiny rock.

But someone could fall in, so Rita went to tidy up.”

She is kneeling at one of the old mining claims as she patiently pushes rocks back into the earth. There once was a nice sign with Dambo’s words, but it has disappeared, with social media troll watchers in hot pursuit online.

To see Rita: Take CO-67 from Cripple Creek toward Victor and Little Grouse Mountain Trailhead for parking. Take a high-altitude stroll or drive to the upper lot to the little log fence.

Isak Heartstone of Breckenridge was the first Colorado troll and he turned into quite the story. An instant success when he was built in 2018. Too much of an instant success, in fact. People by the thousands, sometimes 3,000 a day, poured into his quiet, hidden (not so much) area causing worse than serious parking issues for tiny neighborhoods on the edge of town. Breck took a vote that said to dismantle Isak, the visitor attraction, in 2019.

Plaintive pleas went out to Dambo, who was busy with a special art project in Belgium. He heard them and made a quick return to Breckenridge to reinstall Isak in a town location where people have to hike or bike to see him. Isak resides on Trollstigen Trail near the ice arena … which has some parking for sure.

Who exactly is that creative Thomas Dambo? He was born into an imaginative, environmentally aware family in Denmark in 1979 and he got his start with large-scale installations of reclaimed materials in design college, where he earned a master’s degree.

He has created his recycled-wood sculptures since 2014. Then, in 2016, he found fame with giant trolls, The Six Forgotten Giants, in the Copenhagen area. In 2018, it was six large sculptures, Troll Hunt, hiding in the landscape at Morton Arboretum in Illinois. Fame followed around the globe.

He created his working project farm outside Copenhagen in 2021. In 2023, his Way of the Bird King was an art and storytelling project across six states in America. For one project, he scattered 250 colorful birdhouses across a large metropolitan area. His interactive Trollmap started worldwide with people traveling everywhere on its troll treasure hunt. Those are just a few of his many projects.

Before his trolls and his save-the-earth projects, he had his sights on hip-hop, beatboxing, graffiti and street art. Part of Denmark’s hip-hop music underground, he was in Fler Farver, which released nine albums and performed theatrical shows. thomasdambo.com