Brief by Allen Best
Memorials – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you want an authoritative guide to the lyrics and life of the late singer John Denver, who died 10 years ago in a plane crash, don’t go to the park that bears his name in his adopted hometown of Aspen.
Column by Hal Walter
Agriculture – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
A CATTLE DRIVE in the New West isn’t exactly like Lonesome Dove. For starters, it’s not as romantic. And though there are some perils, it’s nowhere near as dangerous.
Moreover, time is now measured in hours rather than days, weeks, or even months. Horses and mules have given way to heavy-duty pickup trucks and gooseneck stock trailers. And historic routes such as the Goodnight-Loving Trail have been lost to state and federal highways. In short, what used to be the adventure of a lifetime has been reduced to merely a stressful day in the life of the modern-day cosmic cowboy.
Article by Patty Lataille
Agriculture – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
CARING FOR FARM ANIMALS in today’s ultra high tech and modernized age can be a refreshingly innocent and unpretentious pastime. Raising baby goats can actually help reduce your profound cynicism of the world’s current state of affairs down to manageable levels.
Letter from Slim Wolfe
Wildlife – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
We’ve got problem bears roaming the high country, and now there’s a problem teddy-bear named Mohammed who caused a major problem for a schoolteacher in Khartoum, but let’s remember the fable of the dancing bear:
Letter from Ken Jessen
Energy – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
I love letters like the one written by Stephen Glover which ran in the December 2007 issue ofColorado Central. We need creative thinking to solve our energy crisis, but we also need realistic solutions. To add to Glover’s popular myths is that we can run our automobiles and SUVs on ethanol.
Letter from Pepe Herrero
Environment – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
During the 1980s I lived in Salida when a season pass at Monarch cost $84, had no picture or restrictions and I could loan it to my Salida friends when I traveled to Honduras. I manage to visit every year since some of my very best friends still live there and have been able to observe that the long awaited growth is now a reality with all the consequences.
Letter from Orville Wright
Salida History – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Regarding the cover photo on the December edition, I remember when Engine 268 pulled the Christmas Caboose in Salida. I believe it was the only time that engine was used for the event.
Letter from Marty Frick
Nominal Confusion – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed Martha’s Letter from the Editor in the December edition. I noticed David Broder did a similar column in late November, but yours is better. Somehow, we have a nation of people who value exploring space and eart
Column by John Orr
Water – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Arkansas and South Platte Roundtables Combined Meeting
The Arkansas, South Platte and Metro roundtables recently held a combined meeting. Harris Sherman, the Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, was the keynote speaker. He is now a cheerleader for the roundtable process after overcoming his skepticism earlier in the year.
Essay by Ed Quillen
Mountain Life – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
EVERY TIME THE SNOW starts to fall outside, I have this pleasant fantasy that the day will turn into a holiday of sorts. I will sit in an easy chair near a warm fire, as I do as I write this, and the porch will hold a huge pile of split, dry firewood, which it does not as I write this. In my fantasy, the refrigerator and pantry are full, and at hand is a pile of good unread books, along with a Coleman lantern ready to light, just in case the power goes out.
Article by Jennifer Dempsey
Hospice – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
MORE THAN 50 PEOPLE throughout Chaffee County volunteer for Angel of Shavano Hospice. Working in conjunction with hospice doctors, nurses, social workers and therapists, these trained men and women visit dying patients to talk or not talk, to stroke a forehead or massage hands, to run errands, to clean house, and almost always to provide the caregiver with a much-needed break.
Column by John Mattingly
Agriculture – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
“We farmers are going to have the world by the tail with a downhill pull.”
I first heard this from a neighbor in the spring of 1968 when I started farming, and though the words were sometimes different over the next 40 years, the notion was always the same: farmers are bound to get what they richly deserve from the markets.
Review by Lynda La Rocca
Literature – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
I have sung the praises of Gregory Maguire before (for proof, see the December 2004 issue of Colorado Central), and now I’m at it again. The author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West revisits Oz in Son of a Witch, another enchanting, wildly imaginative fable that, like its predecessor, employs humor, drama, horror, and scathing political satire to examine the nature of good and evil.
Review by Ed Quillen
Pets – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Humphrey Lee Bogart
by Phil Klingsmith
Illustrations by Abby Robinson
Published in 2007 by Dunsmith Publishing House, Gunnison
ISBN pending
Review by Slim Wolfe
Rural Life – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still
by Kent Nelson
Publishedby Viking in 2003
ISBN 014200460X
Review by Ed Quillen
History – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Drifting West – The Calamities of James White and Charles Baker
by Virginia McConnell Simmons
Published in 2007 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 0870818740
Column by George Sibley
Horology – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
HEADING INTO THE Year of Our Fear 2008, there are lots of things I think I ought to be writing about: railing on the spineless Congress that’s letting a power-mad administration gut the Constitution; wondering why all our “serious” presidential candidates are letting themselves be forced into a counterproductive Bushian mold of macho toughness; wondering how we are ever going to restore some kind of balance between private wealth and the commonwealth — et cetera.
Article by Marcia Darnell
Marketing – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE MARRIAGE was brief, just two years, and the divorce is amicable, if a little painful.
Alamosa’s marketing district, chamber of commerce and tourism board merged in late 2005, with the intent of pooling resources for a common goal: improving Alamosa’s business climate and attracting more visitors.
Brief by Allen Best
Marketing – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ridership was flat this year on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, but revenue was up 7 percent. How can that be?
“More riders were paying more for luxury on the train,” said Al Harper, owner of the excursion trains since 1998, at a recent Chamber function in Silverton. “The market is telling us there is an insatiable appetite for first-class service.”
Brief by Allen Best Memorials – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine If you want an authoritative guide to the lyrics and life of the late singer John Denver, who died 10 years ago in a plane crash, don’t go to the park that bears his name in his adopted hometown of Aspen. The Aspen …
Brief by Allen Best
Wildlife – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
With most bears in Colorado now removed to their dens for winter, this year’s death toll can now be reckoned.
Across the state, 59 bears were “put down,” to use the common euphemism for the killing of bears by state wildlife officials.
Brief by Martha Quillen
Local News – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Climax Reopening
In early December, Freeport-McMoRan announced its intention to reopen the Climax Molybdenum Mine, with production currently scheduled to begin in 2010. Once mining is underway, the facility will employ about 350 workers. And in the meantime construction activities will mean new jobs, beginning with about 150 workers as projects commence next spring, and expected to peak at about 500 workers.
Brief by Allen Best
Marketing – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Jackson Hole seeks slogan
Those crossing Teton Pass from the west to arrive at the famous ski resort are greeted with a sign that says: “Howdy stranger, yonder is Jackson Hole, the last of the Old West.”
Brief by Allen Best
Leadville – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
A drill platoon from the U.S. Marine Corps stopped in Leadville to shoot a commercial against the backdrop of the Sawatch Range, Colorado’s loftiest.
The marines had also shot commercials at other “iconic sites, including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Grand Canyon, as well as New York’s Time Square, and the Independence Mall in Philadelphia.”
Brief by Allen Best
Transportation – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Crested Butte remains uncertain whether it wants to be more closely connected to the world.
That issue showed up several years ago when paving of Cottonwood Pass on the west side was proposed. It is already paved on the east side, from Buena Vista to the Continental Divide. That paving would have had the practical repercussion of shortening, by about a half-hour, the time it takes to drive between metropolitan Denver and Crested Butte.
Brief by Allen Best
Outdoors – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Yet another hiker got lost while descending 14,005-foot Mount of the Holy Cross in Eagle County. It happens at least once a year, often several, but so far without fatality — a miracle.
Among those miracle cases was that of a retired music teacher who in 1997 was on the thin border of life after spending eight days huddled among rocks above timberline.
Brief by Central Staff
Transportation – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Here’s one of those things you find out when you’re looking up something else. The “something else” started with an email which said there was talk of naming a portion of U.S. 285 in honor of Ralph Carr.
Brief by Central Staff
Water – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
The 2007 election that added a portion of El Paso County and eastern Frémont County to the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District has been contested with a filing at the District Court in Cañon City.
Before the election, the water conservancy district comprised all of Chaffee and Custer counties, western Frémont County, and a sliver of Saguache County along Silver Creek in the Marshall Pass area.
Brief by Allen Best
Water – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
It may not be the sort of thing that a town would put on its “Hello Visitors” welcoming sign, but for the record, Montezuma has water pipes that go 11 feet into the ground.
The one-time mining town, located in Summit County, near the Keystone and Arapaho Basin ski areas, is at more than 10,200 feet in elevation. Engineer Joe Kracum of Glenwood Springs says frostline in most mountain towns goes only 3 to 4 feet deep, but it’s wise to put water lines down 8 to 10 feet. In Montezuma, they’re going just a bit deeper.
Comic Strip written and drawn by Monika Griesenbeck
Mountain Life – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Brief by Marcia Darnell
San Luis Valley – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Forbes Sells Out
The “Capitalist Tool” won’t be seen swooping into the Alamosa airport much anymore. The Forbes Trinchera Ranch has been sold for $175 million. Louis Moore Bacon, chairman of Moore Capital Management, is the new owner of the 171,400-acre parcel near Fort Garland. Moore’s spokesman describes him as an environmentalist and conservationist.
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Central Colorado is in the state’s third and fifth congressional districts, but it’s the second district that has caused considerable political shuffling in recent weeks.
The second district basically comprises Boulder, Grand, Gilpin, Eagle, Summit and Clear Creek counties. It has been represented by Democrat Mark Udall of Eldorado Springs (or, as you will doubtless hear often this year, “Boulder liberal Mark Udall” ).
Essay by Monique Cole
Wildlife – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
A RECENT LOCKDOWN at my daughters’ elementary school in Boulder brought horrific images to mind. But it was no big deal: merely a bear seen near the playground. Ironically, an outdoors program was under way, complete with kayak pool, climbing wall and mountain-bike course. The lockdown is typical of how wildlife interactions can so often become over-reactions.
