Letter from Charlie Green
Geography – August 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Developments in greater metropolitan Cotopaxi
Editors:
OK, Ed. I was pretty ticked to find that you made Cotopaxi the east edge of your Central Colorado diamond. I had always visualized CC as an approximate rectangle: Parkdale; Trinidad; SW corner of the San Luis valley; and Gunnison. I will adjust my boundaries to be more limited. But squinting closely, I could see Texas Creek on the cover of the phone directory which was [almost] geographically congruent with your Salidian (or whatever) oriented vision. On the other hand, this is a case where being in “greater metropolitan Cotopaxi” makes me Central.
Anyway, it is I, the Curmudgeon of Copper Gulch, back again. One more time, the issue of the paving of Copper Gulch Road arises. The closing of the Rainbow Highway between Texas Creek and Parkdale gave us a nice taste of the Curtains for the Arkansas project: the traffic was diverted up Colo. 69 (up in altitude; down on a standard map), toward Westcliffe but many savvy motorists found our unpaved turnoff (Road Gulch Road) and took the short way to Florence (by about 25 miles) or Cañon City (by about 35 miles), depending on their destination. Now Copper Gulch Road looks like Fort Carson did war games on it!! The county just put a fourth layer of patches down.
Slim Wolfe, all hunkered down in his survivalist bunker in Villa Grove, got me going. We had a nice prairie dog colony going up here on the Copper Gulch Divide when a rapacious badger terminated the entire colony with prejudice. We all thought they were cute and entertaining. Now we are dogless. A resupply would be appreciated. And we’ll send the badger (cautiously) to Slim. A hostage trade, so to speak.
But my main beef this month concerns the recently [relatively speaking] reintroduced [to Colorado] Peregrine Falcons. It’s enough to make me give up on being an environmentalist: first a Sharp Shinned Hawk decided my birdfeeder in Colorado Springs was a hawk feeding station, then those little Peregrine bullies from the Royal Gorge started eating “my” Pine Siskins, among other species. Even the Piñon Jays, who are too senseless to be fearful, have become cautious. It isn’t as bad now that the young falcons have fledged but we still see them occasionally. My only consolation is that my feeders don’t empty as fast!
Oh, yeah. On a personal note: a water treatment system for our well water may cost as much as $10,000! The analysis done by a professional confirmed our [amateur] results: our water would be illegal to discharge into any surface waters in the USA! I’ll bet we can beat most Cripple Creek mine drainage for possible environmental damage! Iron, sulfur, TDS, hardness, low pH. Pick an acid soluble mineral; we seem to have it in abnormal levels. I’m gonna get it assayed for gold and silver; maybe it’ll pay for itself. It ain’t all perfect up here behind Lookout Mountain!
Until next time,
Charlie Green
Texas Creek