USPS to shutter mountain town offices
RICO – The post office in Rico is being considered for closing. Rico Mayor Barbara Betts says it’s a serious situation and plans to call a community meeting to feel out a response.

“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.

Towns considering plastic bag taxes

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.
The idea has been kicking around since last winter, when an Aspen city councilman returned from a vacation in the Bahamas deeply concerned by the proliferation of plastic in the ocean. Telluride previously adopted a fee on plastic bags, as have San Francisco, Ireland and others.

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.
Some companies, however, are trying to reduce use of plastic bags. Wal-Mart has set an internal goal of reducing plastic bags by one-third at its stores by 2013.

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.

Snow continues to block some roads
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS – Going into August, some of the more formidable snowbanks on mountain roads of the West still block roads.
“If you’ve witnessed more August snow than what we have in 2011, you’ve been around for a very long time,” writes Tom Ross in Steamboat Today. He’s been around Steamboat since about 1978.

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.
From Crested Butte, the road to the old mining town of Schofield is usually blocked well into July. This year, entering the second week of August, it’s still blocked.

Betty Ford remembered at service in Vail
AVON – Betty Ford, who brightened many a Christmas in Vail with her husband Jerry, lighting the holiday tree in December, was remembered with joy at a celebration of her life. The couple first visited Vail in 1969, when he was still a congressman from Michigan, later buying a condominium in Vail and then, after his presidency, a home at Beaver Creek.

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.

Fast-acting dad saves child from cougar
CANMORE, Alberta – Quick action by a father scared a cougar that had attacked his 6-year-old daughter.

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.

Ski town real estate markets rebound

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.

Mammoth Lakes may nix impact fees
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. – The national debate about how to stimulate the economy is playing out in Mammoth Lakes, where town officials are considering whether to further cut fees assessed on new development in order to nudge the carpenters, masons and others back to work.

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.
– Allen Best