Brief by Ed Quillen
Regional News – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
High Country Agriculture
Agriculture has never been a mainstay of the Lake County economy, since the growing season is short at 10,200 feet.
But that doesn’t stop some people from trying. Acting on a tip that led to a search warrant, the Lake County Criminal Activity Task force raided a residence on Loop Road on Sept. 19, and found 89 marijuana plants and about five pounds of dried hemp. Two people were arrested.
On Sept. 25, another tip and another warrant, this one north of town, where they found about five more pounds, as well as 11 thriving plants.
We’re sure that everyone feels safer now that fewer cannabis plants are under cultivation.
Homeland Security?
And if that doesn’t make you sleep more comfortably at night, you might consider the adventures of Hartsel resident Donna Smith. She and her family live in an isolated spot that isn’t on the power grid; they make their electricity at home with a diesel generator, which requires fuel.
So on Sept. 5, she and her son, Billy, took the family pickup to Colorado Springs. They had a tank in back, which they filled with diesel fuel. Then they dropped by a Wal-Mart. Her son left a book, Bomb Squad, on the front seat.
Wal-Mart employee Jason Greiner spotted the book and the tank, and told his bosses; they called the Colorado Springs Police Department.
Meanwhile, Smith completed her shopping and left the parking lot. She did think it was odd that 15 Wal-Mart employees were staring as she pulled away. But no one asked her why she had diesel fuel.
She shrugged it off, but at 8:30 p.m. that evening, two Park County sheriff’s deputies pulled up to the Smith house — they had located it by running her license plate number.
Her husband stepped outside to greet the deputies. It was chilly, so he had his hands in his pockets. They told him to “Get your hands out of your pockets.”
Eventually, the deputies were convinced that the Smiths were making electricity, not bombs, and they left. Sheriff Fred Wegener said that was the end of it.
Smith told the Fairplay Flume that she saw deputies driving slowly past her home for some time thereafter, as well as low-flying planes over her roof. Further, she said the deputies told her she would be on a “terrorist list” until Sept. 15, “just because this got called in.”
If the suspicious Wal-Mart associate had only asked her openly about the truck’s contents, she would have been glad to explain. “I can understand their paranoia, but they need to understand how we live. We have to haul our supplies. This is America. We should have a right to do what we do on a daily basis.”
Yes, this is America, where an innocent shopping trip may complicate your life.
Candidate Arrested
A candidate for the Leadville City Council was arrested on Oct. 1 and charged with criminal mischief — apparently because he thought the police were laughing at him.
The candidate was Steve Prestash, and it started when he found a latex penis on his front porch. He went to the police station to report the incident, which he said was part of continued harassment which had been going on for seven years.
Policeman Rick Jandegian took the report, and in the process, he assumed a facial expression which caused Prestash to tell him that it wasn’t funny.
Then, according to Jandegian, Prestash grabbed at the bars of the front window of the police station, and pulled them out of the wooden frame. “I did not knowingly do that,” he told the Herald-Democrat in a written statement. “Basically, I blacked out.”
Police did find the latex penis, and logged it into evidence.
Want to be a fire chief?
An ambitious fire fighter could do well in Central Colorado.
Salida Fire Chief Pete DeChant, who had held the position for eight years after coming from Durango, resigned in late September. Everyone involved was rather close-mouthed about the unexpected resignation. He said he was moving to Arkansas, where his family had already moved.
In Leadville, Fire Chief Mike Osborn resigned effective Oct. 15, to run the fire science program at Glendale Community College in Phoenix. He had been in Leadville for only two years.
So there were two jobs open. Then, in September, the directors of the Chaffee County Fire Protection District, which serves the Buena Vista area, decided to hire a full-time fire chief. Current chief Charlie Blake will remain as a volunteer fire-fighter.
Roller derbies
Buena Vista has started construction on a skate-board park, with a concrete pour scheduled for late October.
Saguache held a ribbon-cutting for the Saguache Skatepark on Sept. 27, which started a day of competition.
It’s wholesome recreation, but we caution against expecting much in the way of improved community safety as a result of the new parks.
Salida has had one for several years, and while it gets plenty of use, skaters haven’t confined themselves to the park. We still see them using steps and ramps at banks, churches, the post office, etc. And they’re not always careful about looking where they’re going, so sometimes they careen toward pedestrians. Thus walkers occasionally need alertness and quick steps to avoid collision.
Flight problems
Rural airports may not be all that busy, but they do have problems. In Wyoming, sage grouse have damaged planes as they approached the runways, and Salida pilots know to make a low run over the landing strip, so as to scare away the deer.
The Saguache landing strip has a different problem: a colony of prairie dogs, whose holes are messing up the runway. It’s the responsibility of the county government, but the commissioners haven’t come up with any good removal plan. Drowning won’t work because it won’t get them all and the survivors will breed quickly. And the colony is too close to town to allow shooting.
We have to note that the only pilot we know in the area flies an ultra-light, and since he can take off and land pretty much where he pleases, he hasn’t complained about the prairie dogs.
Another West Nile worry
We thought we’d heard the last of the West Nile Outbreak with the first hard frost, which kills the mosquitoes that spread the infection.
It did spread far into Colorado last summer, reaching Saguache County and even the Western Slope.
And it could spread through the winter by another means: horse meat. Although it’s a common meal for humans in Iceland, France, and Japan, among other places, it’s never really caught on in the United States.
(A linguist once speculated that our culture prefers meat that has its own name. That is, we eat beef, not cow meat; pork and ham, not pig meat; mutton, not sheep meat; etc. We don’t have a word for horse meat, which fits that theory, but what about chicken and turkey?)
Horse meat is a common meal for carnivores at zoos, and it’s the main diet for Mission Wolf in the Wet Mountains. Most of it, about 4 million pounds a year, comes from Central Nebraska Packing Co. in North Platte.
Although horses suffer West Nile infections, none of the meat is tested. There’s no need to, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because “there is no evidence of any animal becoming infected through meat.”
Others aren’t so sure. Rich Bowen, a professor of biomedical sciences at Colorado State University, said that if a mouse is infected with West Nile, then fed to a cat, the cat will become infected. The same has been true of alligators fed infected meat.
As for the wolves, Tom Zieber at Mission Wolf does check for chronic wasting disease when he gets a big-game donation. Those donating horses sign release forms, and “We have to go on the owner’s word.”
A Happy Ending
Julie Guarino of Littleton had a bloodhound named Grace, and since she had just gone back to work full-time, she was worried that Grace wasn’t getting enough attention. Her daughter had a friend named Jen who seemed to get along with Grace, and so a trial adoption was arranged.
On Mother’s Day, Jen and her boyfriend took Grace on a camping trip to Blue Mesa Reservoir west of Gunnison. Grace wandered off. They contacted the authorities and put up posters, but no Grace.
Then in late September, Guarino found a message from a stranger on her cell phone. It was from Kristin Knerr in Gunnison. She had been sitting on her back deck when she saw an emaciated bloodhound crawl out of a culvert.
Knerr too kGrace in, and found Guarino’s phone number on the collar. Grace’s only injury was a chipped tooth that may have come from scavenging roadkill.
Even if Grace had lost her collar, her owner could still have been located, since the dog had a micro-chip implant. It can be scanned at a veterinarian’s office, and the resulting number can be plugged into a database that will return the dog owner’s name and contact information.
Heated Issue
We can safely predict that firewood is going to be very popular this winter in Central Colorado, since natural-gas prices are going to be about 65% higher than they were last winter.
Why? Well, we could blame it on California. Historically, the Rocky Mountain region has always produced more natural gas than it could consume, and its export capacity was limited — the pipelines just weren’t big enough.
Thus natural gas was cheaper here, even though Californians were willing to pay more for it. This did not sit well with natural-gas producers, who understandably wanted the best possible price for their product.
The Bush Administration is no foe to that industry, and so in July of 2002, it expedited the approval of an expansion of a 716-mile pipeline from Wyoming to California. Its capacity more than doubled, to 1.7 billion cubic feet per day, and the expansion was completed in May. It means lower natural gas prices in Utah, Nevada, and California — and higher prices in Colorado and Wyoming, since the producers now have another market.
So, out with the chainsaws and splitting mauls, and learn to enjoy the down-home aroma of fresh wood-smoke.