Column by Hal Walter
Rural Life – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
WHEN YOU FIRST ENTER the Silver Cliff town limits, about five miles east of the actual town on Highway 96, a roadside sign trumpets the area as recipient of the Governor’s award for “smart growth and development.”
Sidebar by Ed Quillen
License Plates – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
You don’t want a job making license plates in Colorado. By state law, Colorado license plates are manufactured in only one place — a factory staffed by inmates at the Old Max prison in Cañon City. Another factory in the prison complex makes the annual renewal stickers that go on the plates.
Sidebar by Ed Quillen
License Plates – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
One reason for the new license plates is to make life easier for law-enforcement; peace officers say that faded old plates are hard to read, as are the recent 3-letter 4-numeral plates that crowd the symbols together.
Aside from the obvious things, like speeding or running a stop sign, what inspires a cop to take a hard look at your license plate?
Compiled by Ed Quillen License Plates – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine County 1930 Pop’n Rank 2-letter 3-letter 1998 Pop’n Rank Denver 287,861 1 AA-GN AAA-DZZ 499,055 2 Pueblo 66,038 2 GP-HX VEZ-VVC 134,867 10 Weld 65,097 3 HY-JW WAA-WNK 159,429 8 El Paso 49,570 4 JX-LL KAA-LZZ 490,378 3 Las Animas 36,008 5 …
Sidebar by Ed Quillen
License Plates – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Old license plates work well for patching knotholes in fences and barn walls. They’re also collectibles for the 8,500 members of the American License Plate Collectors Association.
One of them is Bill Zimmerman of Colorado Springs, who has “five or six hundred” license plates on the interior walls and rafters of his garage.
Article by Ed Quillen
License Plates – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
THIS WAS BACK in the late 1970s, when we owned the Middle Park Times in Grand County and I was talking to some friends who owned a newspaper in adjacent Clear Creek County. I made some joke about them enjoying a “wise” readership because their county’s license plates had the “YY” prefix — two Y’s, which made them “wise,” etc.
Article by Ed Quillen
Art – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT’S EASY TO CHARACTERIZE Leigh Mills as a “working artist,” although it might also be fair to say she sees herself as a “work of art.” Her definition of art is so expansive that there’s no visible line with “daily life” on one side and “art” on the other.
Essay by Martha Quillen
Discourse – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE WAY I SEE IT, arguments are weird and can sometimes get downright surreal. They seldom persuade anyone and almost never resolve anything.
By argument, though, I mean only the dictionary definition, “a discussion in which disagreement is expressed, a debate.” When an argument escalates to a dispute over who threw the first punch or a decibel level calculated to drive out the neighbors, I figure that’s an assault, and thereby an entirely different topic.
Review by Pat Daniel
Outfitting – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Riding West: An Outfitter’s Life
by Jim Greer with Charles Miller
Published in 1999 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 0-870-81525-3
Review by Art Goodtimes
Poetry – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man
Published in 1995 by La Alameda Press, Albuquerque
ISBN 0-9631909-7-0
Sofia
Published in 1999 by La Alameda Press, Albuquerque
ISBN 1-888809-11-6
Blessed Resistance
Published in 1999 by Mariposa Printing & Publishing, Santa Fé
ISBN
Review by Marcia Darnell
Fiction – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Woman Who Knew Too Much
Published in 1998
by Cleis Press San Francisco
by Bett Reece Johnson
ISBN: 1-57344-045-0
and
The Woman Who Rode to the Moon
Published in 1999 by Cleis Press
by Bett Reece Johnson
San Francisco
ISBN: 1-57344-086-8
Brief by Central Staff
Rural Life – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Crestone Charter School will pick up trash and junk
Article by Allen Best
Snow Safety – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
TEN YEARS AGO I invested in my avalanche beacon. A “beeper,” people called it. It emits a signal or, at the flip of a switch, picks up the signals emitted from other beacons.
Companions on back-country ski adventures routinely carried beacons.
“Everybody have beacons?” somebody always asked as we set out for one of the 10th Mountain Division huts. Then we were off.
Brief by Central Staff
Land Use – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Public agencies usually don’t buy or sell land. Instead, they trade it, and two proposed land swaps in Central Colorado are generating some controversy.
In 1997, several large ranches in southern Lake County went on the market. Three were purchased by the cities of Pueblo and Aurora for their water rights.
Brief by Central Staff
Salida Politics – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Salida will celebrate Leap Day with a special election which results from petitions — “the Frantz Lake Initiative” — circulated last fall.
It’s about the use of city-owned land in an area that has already seen plenty of contention, mostly related to expansion of the golf course.
The land in question has been used as a shooting range by the Salida Gun Club, and it sits between Frantz Lake (owned by the state) and a gravel pit (owned by the city and leased to Kaess Contracting).
Brief by Central Staff
Salida Politics – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Salida Council tables a proposed Official Secrects Act
We were among those present at the Feb. 7 meeting of the Salida City Council for its consideration of a proposed Official Secrets Act.
That’s not what they called it, of course. It was an ordinance to “protect confidentiality.”
Brief by Central Staff
Arts – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you’ve ever wanted to write a play and see it performed, the Crystal Mountain Center for the Performing Arts in Westcliffe would like to hear from you.
It’s sponsoring New Colorado Voices 2000, its second annual one-act play competition.
Five one-act plays will be honored, and two will be staged at the Jones Theater in Westcliffe next summer, with the playwrights each receiving $100. Last year’s winners were Susan Hering of Boulder and Jonathan Ambler of Rye.
Brief by Central Staff
Pack-Burro Racing – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
As best we know, there’s only one burro monument in the world — the Prunes memorial on Front Street in Fairplay.
It will soon have a companion, which will display engraved brass plaques with the names of every Fairplay pack-burro race winner since the contests began in 1949.
Brief by Central Staff
February 2000 edition – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Among the many things we should have done but didn’t:
The February edition had an article by Allen Best about the proposed White River National Forest plans and their possible effects on Central Colorado.
Brief by Central Staff
Geography – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
The little mountain that doesn’t have a name might be a little closer to getting one, now that the people who think it should have a name have agreed on one: Headwaters Hill.
The 11,862-foot peak is in Saguache County, 4½ miles south of the summit of Marshall Pass. It’s a rare triple divide (there are only five in the continental United States), and it separates these watersheds:
Brief by Central Staff
Transportation – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
What’s ahead for the old Denver & Rio Grande Western rail line across Tennessee Pass, now owned by the Union Pacific and out of service for more than a year?
Depends on which piece of track you’re asking about. On the east end, the UP sold the segment from Cañon City through the Royal Gorge to Parkdale. It’s now in use for freight (the Rock & Rail hauling from a quarry) and passengers (Cañon City & Royal Gorge excursion trains).
Brief by Marcia Darnell
Transportation – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Cumbres & Toltec hits some rough track
The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad is a narrow gauge, coal-fired wonder that runs between Antonito and Chama, N.M., in the summer months. The operation has been in danger of derailment recently over old rails, failing equipment and battles between its owner and manager.
Brief by Central Staff
National Politics – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
It’s a Presidential Election Year, and so
… We’re Important
“The changing demographics [of the Interior West] are partly due to what Marc Perry of the Census Bureau calls the ‘All the way there, half the way back’ phenomenon. That is to say, easterners who migrated to California and have become disillusioned with the state’s urbanization — and for some, with California’s growing Latino population — have sought new frontiers in the interior states. This demographic shift will benefit the region politically in the census, as six of the nine congressional seats expected to migrate as a result of the census will go to the Interior West….
Brief by Central Staff
Coming Events – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Last year, we had to go from Salida to Gunnison on the same morning that 2,000 bicyclists were peddling from Gunnison to Salida on the Ride the Rockies tour sponsored by the Denver Post.
The cyclists were taking Monarch Pass, so we drove over unpaved Marshall Pass, thereby avoiding the worst of the congestion.
Brief by Marcia Darnell
San Luis Valley – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Eminent Domain of Trash
The EPA is back in the Valley, this time with backup from the state Department of Public Health. It seems that Costilla County has graded and sloped its dump outside the designated pit area. In other words, the county is trespassing on private property. Ken Hershey of Mesita, owner of said property, is claiming violation of his constitutional rights.
Brief by Central Staff
Water – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Water gets bought and sold all the time in the West, and, you guessed it, somebody is setting up a water market on the Internet.
The website is www.water2water.com, and it’s operated by Azurix Corp. Azurix is a spin-off from Houston-based Enron Corp., which trades electricity and natural gas.
Comic Strip by Clint Driscoll and Laura Ravenwood
Mountain Life – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Essay by Susan Zakin
Judicial System – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
I’VE FOUND AN odd career as the token eco-feminazi on a succession of hunting and fishing magazines, writing for editors who tell me that their politics are “to the right of Attila the Hun.” It’s reassuring that these guys seem to appreciate good journalism, even from someone whose politics are to the left of Hillary Clinton.
But all that’s changing now. I’m crossing over, just like Thelma in Thelma and Louise. Brace yourself Bo Gritz, I’m ready to hunker in the bunker.
HYDROLOGIC CONDITIONS
Snowpack conditions continue to improve in most basins in Colorado. The snow/water equivalent of average, as of 3/1: Gunnison, 76%; Upper Colorado, 86%; South Platte, 93%; Laramie/N. Platte, 94%; Yampa/White, 97%; Arkansas, 72%; Upper Rio Grande, 51%; and San Miguel/Delores/Animas/San Juan, 58%. Reservoir storage remains above average. Recent storms in southern Colorado have improved snowpack in those basins.
