Local public relations firm owner Sheryl Barto and retired Lt. Col. Dick Merritt have enjoyed a relationship that has included the two working together at a horse-therapy program for people with autism and veterans with PTSD since 2016. The Roaring Fork Valley can do that — bring people from different backgrounds to unite for a good cause. Now the two are now marveling at how her son Mark Barto, a 2014 graduate of Basalt High School, is attending the very training center in California where Merritt was a student in 1959 and an instructor in 1964. The facility, the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in the Sierra Nevada mountains, was built in 1951 to give soldiers a high-altitude, cold-weather setting to prepare for similar, harsh conditions in Korea.