Brief by Ed Quillen
Regional News – May 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Early Fire Season
March in Central Colorado is usually a miserable time of year with soggy snowstorms and cold winds. This year was different, with generally pleasant weather.
However, those warm, dry days didn’t do the snowpack any good, and they allowed for an early start to the wildfire season. A fire west of Fort Collins got the attention from the Denver statewide media, but there were several fires closer to home.
One began on March 22 on private land near Shawnee. The property owner, David Ray, was conducting a controlled burn when wind gusts took sparks to dried grass, making it an uncontrolled burn. He had permission from the U.S. Forest Service, and no county or fire-district bans were in place, but he didn’t have any water or fire-fighting tools at hand.
Traffic on U.S. 285 was reduced to one lane as fire-fighting equipment arrived; the fire was contained that night. The Platte Canyon Fire District, which implemented a ban right after this fire, has gone to court to recover fire-fighting costs from Ray.
That fire district will have trouble figuring out who might be responsible for the costs of a fire near Bailey on April 5. Lightning hit a pine tree and traveled down to the roots, then to a “locate cable” that ran beside a natural gas line. It melted the pipe and set the gas on fire, which came to the surface. The fire was quickly contained, but allowed to burn for a while so the gas company could figure out what happened.
Back on March 22, a remote cabin under construction was destroyed by fire near the old mining camp of Vulcan in western Saguache County (so far west that the Gunnison County Volunteer Fire Department responded). The cause is under investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the Saguache County Sheriff’s Department. The fire was spotted by a United Parcel Service pilot, and a nearby military plane located its GPS co-ordinates.
A grass fire burned 55 acres near Johnson Village in Chaffee County on March 18. It had been started as a “controlled burn” for cleaning ditches by a Colorado Department of Corrections work crew, and then the wind came up.
This year, “controlled burn” is starting to sound as oxymoronic as “honest politician” or “ethical journalist.”
Town Water
How much water you have for your yard may depend on which side of the Sangres you’re on.
The Round Mountain Water District serves Westcliffe and Silver Cliff residents, and as of April 1, all watering restrictions were lifted. Residents had been limited to 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on an odd-even schedule.
On the other side of the Sangre de Cristo range, the town board of Saguache voted to impose restrictions this summer. Outside watering is permitted from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., on alternating days with U.S. 285 as the dividing line — and nobody waters on Mondays.
The town board is considering water meters, which inspired Roger Fenton to write in the Crescent that “software can be purchased which connects this [water-meter] hardware to the Internet and sends the data collected to a billing collection service (now-a-days located in India).”
Salida hasn’t changed its watering rules, but the city took a big step to improving its water supply with an April 5 agreement to purchase the 200-acre Vandaveer Ranch on the south side of the city for $3.2 million. The deal includes 300 acre-feet of water rights on the Tennassee Ditch, and some of the rights go back to 1866, which makes them about as senior as any on the Arkansas River.
At least they’re not UFOs
Whether it’s the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, or something we don’t know about, the reports of military aircraft in our skies have increased.
The Crestone Eagle reported that on March 17 and 22, large military cargo jets were “flying low before banking south over the Baca Grande Subdivision toward the Sand Dunes, then turning and heading west” with searchlights.
That area is supposed to be a “quiet zone” for military aircraft, but these originated out of state, and the pilots apparently did not check in with Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, where they would have been told about the zone.
The cargo jets were probably from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. The Gunnison Country Times reported that on those same two days, the U.S. Air Force was conducting high-altitude pilot training for McGuire pilots, and the Gunnison Airport was the hub for the training sessions.
More Air Force planes can be expected, on account of plans to bomb part of Park County with sand bags. It’s part of a training mission for the U.S. Air Force Reserve, and would involve dropping parachuted sand bags on BLM land near Spinney Mountain Reservoir.
Planes would fly as low as 550 feet, with one or two drops during a one-day training run that would occur about once a month. Mountain terrain is important for these missions, according to USAF Major Rob Weimar, but missions would be aborted if people were present on the ground on a training day.
The Silver Screen
Silver City, a movie which did some filming in Leadville and Denver last fall, has been scheduled for September release (this is not carved in stone. Produced by John Sayles, its cast includes Kris Kristoferson, Daryl Hannah, and Richard Drefuss.
The fall release puts it right in the middle of election season, which fits because it’s a political thriller which “follows a grammatically challenged, born-again candidate from a right-wing political dynasty. The candidate is in the midst of fumbling has way toward elected office when an unexplained corpse emerges from Twin Lakes to threaten his campaign.”
Sounds entertaining, and we might recognize some of the Lake County residents as extras.
In the future, we might see some Gunnison County residents on the screen, too. That’s because there’s now a Gunnison County Film Commission, which was formally organized on March 19 with the idea of getting producers to use the Gunnison Country for films, commercials, and television series.
One of the main movers in the commission is Hal Needham, who produced “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Cannonball Run.” He and his wife recently bought a home in Gunnison.
The Commission has already attracted one film job: a commercial for a snow-worthy SUV in Taylor Park. However, Mother Nature wasn’t as co-operative as she usually is in March: snow had to be hauled in for the commercial.
Out of the Running
State Sen. Ken Chlouber, a Leadville Republican, had said he planned to run for Congress from the Third Congressional District. But in late March, he announced that he would not be a candidate.
Chlouber, who has served in the legislature for 18 years, cannot run for state senate again on account of term limits. “I am not declaring an end to my political career, but this is not the right time nor the proper race for me to continue my public service,” he said.
We suspect that Chlouber’s support of Referendum A, the state water funding proposal that failed to carry a single county last year, had something to do with his decision — it would be a major burden for any candidate in rural Colorado, especially the Western Slope.
Another announced Leadville candidate has also decided not to run. Carol Hill, who serves on the city council, had announced her intention to run as a Democrat for a county commissioner’s seat this year.
However, her business (the Book Mine) has grown. “It takes no special skill or courage to sit around in meetings and talk about business and jobs for Lake County,” she wrote to the Herald-Democrat, and “I am very fortunate now to be in a position to do more than talk.”
Spring Cleaning
For some reason, we associate spring with cleaning, and local governments have discovered some piles of trash and junk which appear to require removal.
In Lake County, the county commissioners have started a crackdown, and three properties were inspected. The combined inventory included 28 unlicensed vehicles, nine possibly unlicensed vehicles, two mobile home frames, five oil drums, 20 pallets, 10 tires, 50 bales of hay, along with lumber, trash, a bicycle and a lawnmower.
Park County plans legal action against a Hartsel resident whose 15 acres contained 33 cars, piles of tires, and barrels of oil. The county got a bid of $140,000 to remove the material, but the property isn’t worth that much. So if the county cleaned it and applied a lien, and the owner walked away, the county would lose money in the deal, something that isn’t supposed to happen. So the county will instead pursue both civil and criminal actions against the property owner.
Many towns encourage spring cleaning. Generally, dump fees are waived for a few days, special equipment might be available, that sort of thing.
Saguache, for instance, had a clean-up week scheduled for April 20-24, with free dumping at the county landfill, and a dump truck, pickups, and trailers available in town.
In Twin Lakes residents turned out on March 19 to haul out truckloads of underbrush from the park across the street from the general store.
In Crested Butte, however, some town board members are questioning the value of spring cleaning. Participation has declined from about 100 people 30 years ago to 32 last year. And one council member said people seem to hoard their trash through the winter so they can dispose of it for free during cleanup, an event that costs the town $14,000.
Vail solved the participation problem by paying volunteers — not directly, but $25 a head to a local charity of choice. Now, about 150 people participate each spring, and one resident said that even the cigarette butts along I-70 get picked up.
Despite drought,
snowslides still kill
The depth of the snowpack may have been a disappointmnt this winter, but there was still enough snow on the high peaks to be deadly.
On April 9, a California man died after being caught by a snowslide at about 4 p.m. in the area of 14,003-foot Mt. Huron. His two companions were able to escape, and were not injured.
A similar avalanche killed a Colorado Springs man on March 20 on 14,371-foot La Plata Peak near Twin Lakes. Two of his companions were partially buried and suffered minor injuries.
According to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, this year’s low snowpack — one that shrunk during a warm March — is actually more dangerous than the accumulation during a more typical winter.
That’s because a shallow snow cover is weaker than a deep one, and thus the upper zone is more likely to form an unstable slab that can come lose at the slightest provocation.
These “shallow hard-slab avalanches” are common in the early winter, but are unusual in the spring.
The CAIC says that “Shallow hard slabs and crusts perched directly above weak layers should never be trusted. The problem is this type of instability can be very localized and very dependent upon the time of day. In the spring early in the day is almost always a better time to travel steeper slopes. If faced with a late-day descent on steep slopes and shallow snow, you’ll be safer to find less-steep terrain or stick to bare ground. Don’t let your guard down.”
The Crime Beat
Custer County Sheriff Fred Jobe heard that minors were buying alcohol from a package outlet in the Wet Mountain Valley. So he made arrangements with the state liquor enforcement office to conduct a sting, with an underaged woman from Cañon City attempting to make purchases.
Even though the complaint concerned only one outlet, Jobe decided to “hit all four so as not to single anyone out.” The result surprised him: “All four sold alcohol without asking for an ID.”
The four clerks face criminal citations, and the businesses could face fines and suspension of their licenses. The four outlets were the Liquor Cabinet, Antler Liquor Store, Valley Fuel, and the Westcliffe Supermarket.
In Leadville, a stolen truck turned out to be easy to find. On March 21, the owner of a 2002 Dodge Dakota reported it stolen. As Leadville policeman Steve James drove to the house to take the report, he saw the vehicle parked about a block away. It was locked, and nothing was missing from the interior.
Another Leadville resident wasn’t quite so lucky. He started his car and left it running to warm up on March 13, then went back to his apartment in the Tabor Grand. When he returned, the car was still there — but it had been turned off, and the keys were gone.
April Foolery
Near Crestone, archæologists found ancient stonework with Mayan-style glyphs at an exposed flank of Pyramid Hill, whose top has for generations attracted prayer flags, crystals, offerings and rock cairns.
In Gunnison, Western State College began adjusting to its new role after the governor announced that the campus would become a 3,000-bed minimum security prison. Wal-Mart announced it would include affordable housing as part of its new mega-store, and a 121-pound catfish was pulled out of Blue Mesa Reservoir.
Custer County children were invited to an Easter Hunt, where they could “meet the Easter Prairie Dog, hunt for chocolate prairie dogs, and even take one of the cute little critters home.” And a new television show was being filmed in Westcliffe: “Cowboy Eye for the City Guy,” which transformed urban immigrants into drivers of 1986 Ford F-150s.
And as you might have guessed by now, all of these things were reported in the April 1 editions.
