Ear to the ground

“Who loses a bright pink suitcase?”

– A Durango woman after getting the United Airlines treatment and seeing her baggage vanish off the face of the earth

Second home-grown

Call it the case of the cannabis caretaker. Police in nearby Telluride recently nabbed a second home caretaker who had converted a section of the trophy home he was overseeing into a grow room.

Mike Perkins had been employed to oversee the multimillion dollar home for nine years, according to a report in the Telluride Daily Planet. It is believed that he grew and harvested copious quantities of pot from the second home during his entire tenure.

Perkins’ grow room was located in a hidden nook in the massive house, which can be seen from the Telluride gondola. He had placed the entertainment center over a hatch leading to a crawl space, where his agricultural operation was located.

While spikes in the power bill often reveal many such operations, the trophy home in question consumes so much power that the grow room went unnoticed. “These huge homes take so much electricity,” Dale Wood, Mountain Village police chief, said. “I think it’d be pretty easy to mask.”

In true Telluride fashion, Perkins, who is also a Mountain Village business owner, received probation for the offense. He was given one year of unsupervised probation and 48 hours of community service, fined $902, and instructed to make a $10,000 donation to the Montrose Drug Task Force.

Not surprisingly, Perkins is currently looking for a new caretaker’s position. “I don’t know how much that home is worth, but it’s several million dollars,” Wood told the paper. “When your trusted caretaker is conducting criminal activity, that’s cause for concern.”

The mustache award

A Durango athlete “got milk” this week. Durango High School student Matt Mulligan has been awarded the Scholar Athlete Milk Mustache Athlete of the Year (SAMMY) Award.

The SAMMY Award provides $7,500 college scholarships to high school seniors who are top performers in the classroom, their respective sports, communities and “also include milk as part of their daily routine.” Mulligan was one of 25 student athletes in the nation to receive the honor.

Mulligan’s achievements include maintaining a 4.06 GPA throughout high school, while participating in competitive freestyle skiing, winning a Silver Medal in the 2007 Junior Olympics and a Bronze Medal in the 2008 and 2009 Junior Olympics.

Mulligan will attend an awards ceremony this weekend at Disney World, where he will join all of the SAMMY winners in donning the famous Milk Mustache for an ad that will appear inUSA Today on June 26.