The line snaked down the block for hours in the shadow of the Flatiron mountains, Super Tuesday caucus goers trickling in at the doors, bottlenecked at a row of tables where a skeleton crew of Boulder County Democratic Party volunteers hopelessly but cheerfully tried to check them all in by precinct and send them to the proper classrooms to debate the merits of their candidates and cast their votes.

About 20 Boulder city precincts were caucusing at the high school. The meetings started at 7 p.m. and were supposed to end at 9 p.m. but that didn’t happen. They stretched on until 10 p.m. in parts, even after media outlets were reporting that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders had defeated Hillary Clinton in Colorado.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Sanders statewide drew 71,711 votes (58.9 percent) and Clinton 49,134 votes (40.4 percent). In Boulder County, the state Democratic Party reported Sanders pulled down 17,275 10,982 votes to Clinton’s 6,265 votes. Clinton won in eastern plains counties and in working-class heavily Latino Pueblo County.

At Boulder High, as at locations across the heavily Democratic county, historic voter turnout tested the limits of the caucus system, straining patience on one hand and fueling greater enthusiasm on the other.

“Look at all of you. Aren’t you proud to be Democrats tonight?” Mary Hey, Precinct 831 organizer, asked the 102 voters jam-packed into a small history course classroom in a corner of the third floor of the school.

“Wow,” said Boulder County Party Treasurer Celeste Landry into a microphone in the school auditorium, looking out over the standing-room crowd that filled the main floor, the balcony and foyer outside.

The high school is located just below the campus of the University of Colorado, and the super site crowd skewed heavily toward voters under 30 — who caucused in large percentages for Sanders.

Loren Weinberg, a longtime Boulder resident said the crowd Tuesday was larger and perhaps even more energized than the crowd drawn in 2008, when the Democratic primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was making headlines around the world.

“I’m just so blown away by the participation tonight,” he said. “I want to know more about what’s generating it all.”

Weinberg said that in 2008, his precinct caucus attracted about 70 participants. This time 102 voters attended. He said in 2000, when then-Vice President Al Gore was running, seven voters attended the precinct meeting. The Sanders phenomenon was something to watch, he said.

“This is all being generated for the young voters by a 70-year-old man,” he said, shaking his head. “All these young people.”

“It’s a lack of slickness, that’s what they like about Sanders,” Hey said. “One after another, what they’re saying is, ‘No one bought our candidate.’ They say, ‘Bernie has been saying the same thing for years. He is who he is.’

“I hope they’re getting the bigger picture,” she added. “You gotta vote every time — the general election, midterm elections — every time. Don’t fool around.”

State Rep. KC Becker, D-Boulder, was caucusing for Hillary Clinton. She climbed the stage in the auditorium to rally support, but she knew the crowd she was addressing. She ended up celebrating participation as much as making the case for Clinton.

“As long as people are showing up, it’s good,” she later told The Statesman. “There’s great energy, great awareness about the political process. I just hope the crowd here is a reflection of the enthusiasm we’ll see for the general election, too. Ultimately, I think Hillary Clinton will win, and that she’ll be a great president.”

Some of the caucus goers expressed bafflement over the decision made by the state Republican Party last year to do away with presidential preference polling at their caucuses.

“What are they afraid of?” said one caucusgoer festooned with Hillary buttons. She had an exaggerated look of disbelief on her face, laughing with her friends. “Look at this place. You think people are filling this whole enormous building to vote for city council? I don’t understand anything about Republicans.”

Steve Fenberg is running to replace state Sen. Rollie Heath, who is term-limited in Boulder’s Democratic stronghold Senate District 18.

“It’s strange. I mean, on Facebook there’s an ‘I’m caucusing’ tag. People across the country are talking about today, but in Colorado it only applies to Democrats,” he told The Statesman.

How can taking part in a national primary election not be a good thing for a political party, he asked.

“The more people participate, the better. My opinion is that we end up with better candidates, no matter what, when more people show up. It’s a huge misstep in my opinion for the Republican Party because, basically, people have just forgotten about them. They’re not part of the conversation.”

The Boulder Daily Camera reported early Wednesday that perhaps thousands of Democratic voters in the county had been turned away at their overrun caucus sites.

At Boulder High, voter Elizabeth Padilla was afraid people were being turned away from their precinct meetings because they made it into the building so late and others were never even getting into the building at all.

“This is a shame. This is an important process,” she said. “No one should be denied. You can see people wandering around looking for their caucus rooms. I’m just saying that we have to put this out there, let people know what’s happening, because it impacts our future, and it needs to change.”

Officials have been floating the idea that Colorado should do away with caucusing — a conversational, public-meeting process — and take up the simple primary voting system.

But many of the people who were caucusing Tuesday, even in packed stuffy rooms, seemed to appreciate that they were part of something.

“Democracy in action,” yelled one young man walking with friends down a hallway.

“Public participation, it’s uplifting,” said a young woman in a striped dress as she exited her precinct room slowly, pressed in on all sides by fellow caucus goers. “Even if this is the whitest crowd ever,” she joked.

Elsewhere in Boulder County, the scene was much the same.

In Longmont, lines were already forming at 6:15 p.m. outside Westview Middle School, which serves only 750 students. Traffic filed neatly into the parking lot from both north- and south-bound Airport Road without benefit of traffic light or flagger. But that’s where any semblance of organization ended.

Inside, people filed into the cafeteria, nesting around precinct markers. Shari Malloy, a local Democratic Party leader, took the stage to tell everyone they had to move to the gym. An hour later, Malloy said that volunteers would try to get everyone in to vote, but added that the longer they all stayed past 9 p.m., the more money it would cost the party in rental and custodial fees.

“We planned for a large crowd,” Malloy said. “We didn’t plan for a ginormous crowd.”

The Sanders Boulder County tally has been updated above to reflect the latest numbers.

With reporting by Roxann Elliott.

— john@coloradostatesman.com