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USPS to shutter mountain town offices “The post office is really more than a place to get your mail,” explained Betts. “It’s the community gathering place for us. It’s the way we communicate with one another. We go to the post office, we run into people and say, ‘Did you hear this about so and so?’” The same is said at Ophir, which may also lose its post office. The U.S. Postal Service has had its sales trimmed for years, losing business first to UPS and Fed Ex and, particularly in the last decade, to the Internet. Advertisers have been sending less information through the mail – and, for that matter, so have people. More and more, we dispatch e-mails instead of letters. As it gets no federal taxpayer support, the Postal Service has cut corners, assigning carriers to longer routes, for example. It has also talked about cutting service on Saturdays. Two weeks ago, the Postal Service announced plans to study the nearly 3,700 post offices that it says are underused. In at least some cases, the agency would like to sell stamps, flat-rate packaging and other basic services through a third-party purveyor, such as a grocery store. Ophir has no other businesses. It’s an old railroad town set at nearly 9,700 feet that once served as a headquarters for mining camps. It now has a population of about 200 people. Rico is a little larger, with a population of 250 that doubles in summer, and it is directly on a highway, helping nourish a restaurant, gas station and a few other businesses. As the name (Spanish for “rich”) indicates, it too was a mining town. Various other mountain towns of the West are also being considered for closing. Those in Colorado include Red Cliff, a dozen winding miles south of Vail; Silver Plume, along I-70 between Summit County and Denver; Pitkin and Parlin, east of Gunnison; and Ward, west of Boulder along the Peak to Peak Highway. In Rico, Mayor Betts plans a community meeting. As in other matters of great seriousness, she’s sending out a broadcast alert – by e-mail. It is, after all, cheaper and faster than sending a letter. BASALT – Town councils in Aspen, Basalt and Carbondale will soon take up a proposal to enact a 10- to 20-cent “impact” fee on plastic bags. By one estimate, the average American gets 400 plastic bags per year, most of them at grocery stores. The three towns, all of whom have grocery stores, might be more effective if they enacted similar regulations in concert. A fourth, Glenwood Springs, has rejected a fee. As reported by the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, council members were split, but the prevailing opinion was that the government does not have a justified role in this component of the marketplace. Whole Foods Market, which will open a store in Basalt next year, has taken an even stronger stand. The grocery chain, which specializes in organic foods, banned plastic bags in 2008 and has never looked back. “There was very little push-back,” a spokesman told The Aspen Times. Whole Foods sells re-useable grocery bags for less than $1, but also offers paper bags that are made from 100 percent post-consumer recycled content. Ross reported water levels are now just falling and that some creeks in the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness can be forded safely, while snow continues to crowd some high-country lakes. The road across Buffalo Pass remained blocked by two snowbanks going into August. Located north of Steamboat, the snow-measuring site there perennially has Colorado’s deepest snowpack. Stories told at the service, which was covered by the Vail Daily, included one when she was cooking when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1973 and Jerry became the nation’s chief executive. When he called to tell her, she said, “If you’re president of the United States, why am I cooking dinner?” She was, noted the paper, a professional dancer and a Sunday school teacher and a woman without pretense. She was also remembered for her convictions. They were not necessarily those of the Republican Party then, or now. The father was walking in front of the girl along a lake southeast of Banff and Canmore when the cougar pounced. The father screamed and threw his water bottle at the 80-pound cat. The startled cougar took off, leaving the girl with few scratches. Had the cougar been a better hunter, the outcome might have been different, wildlife authorities told the Rocky Mountain Outlook. Just the same, they were puzzled why the cougar had attacked. It was well fed. They know the mother of the 2-year-old lion had died, and they think the cat had failed to learn to be wary of people. The cat was later tracked down and killed, as history has shown that if a young cat attacks a human once, it will do so again. That said, this is the first cougar attack in Banff-Canmore since 2001. About 250 miles south in Montana, a grizzly bear attacked a 50-year-old hiker in Glacier National Park. The hiker said he had been making noise, but nonetheless rounded a bend in the trail and encountered the sow, which had one sub-adult with her. The hiker sustained bites to his leg and arm before the bear retreated. He was able to hike out on his own, reports the Whitefish Pilot. CRESTED BUTTE – Real estate sales in Crested Butte have picked up this summer, but it appears to be due to bottom-feeding as buyers snap up foreclosed properties. The Crested Butte News reports a median price of $280,000, compared to $340,000 last year. In Eagle County, one-fifth of all sales have been bank sales, the Vail Daily reported. Measured simply by total dollar volume, the market has slipped from last year. Buoyed by the sale of a $16 million house and a $38 million hotel in Snowmass, Pitkin County had a strong June. The average sale price of $4.8 million is 10 percent ahead of last year. The number of foreclosures was just 8 percent of all sales, reports The Aspen Times. Four types of fees are on the table, reports The Sheet, and some of them have already been curtailed. The cuts parallel those in broader Mono County. |