The frosted window gracing this month’s cover was taken on a cold January afternoon at the Beckwith Ranch, northwest of Westcliffe on Colo. Highway 69.
Wet Mountain Valley
In Land we Trust
By Elliot Jackson The news coming from the Colorado State Demography Office, by way of a July 2017 article in the Denver Post, is eye-opening: by 2050, the state’s population is predicted to rise to 8.5 million – a 50 percent increase from 2015 levels. Most of this growth is projected to take place along …
Restaurant Review: Chappy’s Mountain View Bar and Grill
By Elliot Jackson 213 Main Street, Westcliffe, CO 81252 719-783-0813 Monday – Saturday: 11:30 a.m. – 10 p.m. Sunday: 11 a.m. – 9 p.m. For a town of its size (565, or 1,152 if you combine it with neighboring Silver Cliff), Westcliffe has an amazing number of restaurants. Not all of them are open all …
The Falcon’s Message
By Hal Walter
While driving home through the Wet Mountain Valley after picking up a homeopathic remedy for a sick cow, I detected a quick motion coming from behind and in a field to the right. Before I could even turn my head, the bird – surely a peregrine falcon – was angling across the road in front of me like a rocket, riding the contours with its built-in radar over fencelines and the rolling landscape.
The ‘Wet’ Mountain Valley ain’t all that wet
By Hal Walter
Geographers seem to agree the definition of a desert is a region where annual precipitation amounts to less than 10 inches.
By that definition those of us in the Westcliffe area may be living in a desert this year, and for sure we lived in one last year when the total was 9.34 inches. The least ever recorded was in 2002 when we received 8.77 inches.
In fact, this place ironically called the “Wet” Mountain Valley has been a desert about a half-dozen years since records began being kept in 1948, and we’ve hovered at just about the desert mark several other times with precipitation just a tad over 10 inches, like in 1973 when 10.03 inches were recorded.
Bowling for an identity in Westcliffe
Column by Hal Walter
Wet Mountain Valley – May 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
AFTER YEARS OF STUDY, it has occurred to me that _Westcliffe is a town that’s always striving to find an identity or to be something more than it is. And it never quite pans out. But recently I’ve seen a sign that perhaps this century-long identity crisis is coming to an end.
It’s odd that we use the name “Westcliffe” as a catch-all for what really is two towns, Westcliffe and Silver Cliff, plus the outlying areas of Custer County, where most of the residents actually reside. I sometimes use the word “Clusterplex” to describe this far-flung little community.