Robber tries Robin Hood defense
JACKSON, Wyo. – Credit Corey Allan Donaldson with creativity. When he robbed a bank in Jackson of $140,000 on New Year’s Eve, he told the manager that members of a Mexican cartel were outside the building, prepared to blow it up if he didn’t get the money.
JACKSON, Wyo. – Credit Corey Allan Donaldson with creativity. When he robbed a bank in Jackson of $140,000 on New Year’s Eve, he told the manager that members of a Mexican cartel were outside the building, prepared to blow it up if he didn’t get the money.
On the lam, he used the improbable name of Dooby Zonks while staying in the $270-per-night Grand American Hotel in Salt Lake City.He also gave $16,000 to a friend who was in a pinch and, when arrested by police in Clinton, Utah, had envelopes of cash for his mother and sister.
The Jackson Hole News&Guide reports that Donaldson tried using a Robin Hood defense. A 40-year-old self-help author and online entrepreneur, he told jurors of his childhood in Melbourne, Australia, and the experience of watching his father lose the family’s home to foreclosure.
“I came up with the idea of that since the banks had been bailed out and the people had not, I was going to confiscate money from the U.S. Bank in Jackson and redistribute it to the poor and homeless in America,” he said.
But the judge wouldn’t allow this line of argument. However, he did allow the testimony of the bank manager, who said he never doubted Donald’s claims about explosives until after police arrived and searched the area.
“You feel like you’ve got to make peace with your maker,” said the bank manager. The newspaper says the bank manager looked shaken as he left the witness stand.
Clerk unmasks and headlocks bandit
WHISTLER, B.C. – A man estimated to be in his early 20s, walked into a beer and wine store in Whistler, a green plaid scarf pulled over his face. He carried a knife in each hand and told the clerk it was a robbery.
Pique reports that the clerk thought it was a friend playing a joke and pulled the scarf down to get a better look at his friend.
Whoops. It really was a robber.
Just the same, the clerk put his assailant into a headlock before pushing him out of the store. The robber was last seen running away.
Crested Butte slashes season passes
CRESTED BUTTE – Crested Butte has finally joined the club. Like most of the ski resorts in the West, it has now slashed the price of its season pass, hoping to make up the difference in quantity.
Last winter’s pass that cost $1,049 next winter will cost $599.
With this new vehicle, Crested Butte hopes to draw more skiers from Colorado’s Front Range. There, the skiing throngs have many options, most prominently the Vail’s Epic Pass, which costs $689 and is good at five ski areas in Colorado, three in California, and, if you really want to go there, one each in Michigan and Minnesota.
In slashing the price, Crested Butte joins Jackson Hole and other ski resorts that finally succumbed to the wave that was launched in 1998 at Idaho’s Bogus Basin. With plenty of terrain but not many skiers, the general manager at Bogus decided that less would be more: more skiers paying less for ski passes would create an overall gain. Colorado’s Winter Park followed suit the next winter, and then Vail Resorts, with its quartet of ski areas along the I-70 corridor, upped the ante.
The news of the price cut was met favorably in Crested Butte, which is four hours and three mountain passes from Denver.
“Having one of the highest season pass prices in Colorado benefitted no one,” wrote Mark Reaman, editor of the Crested Butte News. He advised locals to hop on the wagon by buying the new pass, and openly hoped that second-home owners and other visitors might be induced to visit more frequently.
Quakes common in hot springs country
RIDGWAY – Two earthquakes, one measured at 2.9 and the other at 2.6 on the Richter scale, were recently detected in the Ridgway area, at the north end of the San Juan Mountains.
“They are the smallest anyone can actually feel,” said Paul Caruso, geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The earthquakes are not uncommon in that area, he told The Telluride Watch. “You have two hot springs in the area. Any time you have hot springs, that can be an indication of active faults.”
Gun talkers at Aspen Ideas Festival
ASPEN – You can bet that some news will come out of Aspen just before the Fourth of July. That’s when the Aspen Ideas Festival will be held, and since its inception several years go, it has become one of the most highly regarded talk-festivals in North America.
This year, firebrand Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association, will be interviewed, as will Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
As well, Ariana Huffington, founder of the website bearing her name, will talk with Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Balkfein and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu about how cities will shape our economic future.
The lineup isn’t yet complete, but you can imagine that this is just the tip of the nerdy egghead stuff as thoughtful and outspoken people get together to sort out the problems of the nation and world.
Co-housing units may work. Or not.
WHISTLER, B.C. – Plans are moving ahead in Whistler for a co-housing project. The essential idea is that people have smallish but separate units with shared commons areas, such as for food preparation and dining.
Still to be seen is whether there are people who actually want to live in such a project. “I just intuitively feel like Whistler … very well might embrace this,” said Alan Forrester, co-housing proponent. Or, he added, they might not. “It just depends.”
North America has 140 co-housing projects, including one in Calgary, Alberta, and several in British Columbia.
In the United States, California has 40 existing or planned co-housing projects, the most of any state; followed by Washington state with 20 and Colorado with 18. Those in Colorado are primarily in Boulder and its suburbs.
Torches come out for prescribed burns
TELLURIDE – It’s springtime, and the mountains seem to be alive with the crackling of fire.
From Telluride to Banff come reports of prescribed fires to burn the accumulated fuel before nature takes matters into its own hands.
In Naturita, about 40 miles west of Telluride, federal land agencies set a fire that was intended to burn about 110 acres. While late snows this year moderated the fire danger, bushes and forests remain uncommonly dry.
“We will have fires this season,” declared Chris Barth, the public information officer with the Montrose Interagency Fire Management Unit. “We are still in a drought,” he added, before encouraging people to reduce fire risk around their homes and other property.
The Colorado State Forest Service now has a web-based tool that will allow people living in the wildland-urban interface to assess the risks to their homes. By one estimate, between 20 and 25 percent of Colorado’s 5.2 residents live in fire-prone ecosystems.
In Canada, Parks Canada had waited for just the right mix of temperature, humidity and winds to set ablaze an area in Banff National Park. That moment finally arrived, and there’s now a firebreak to block fires moving down the Bow Valley toward Canmore. The fire may also help restore the endangered whitebark pine, foresters tell the Rocky Mountain Outlook.
Parks Canada has a national goal of restoring fire within national parks to 50 percent of the long-term fire cycle. That fire cycle was interrupted by fire suppression efforts beginning about 100 years ago.
First electric vehicle arrives in Steamboat
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS – Ever so slowly, electric vehicles are making their way into garages and fleets in cities. In mountain towns, not so fast.
But Steamboat now has what seems to be the first all-electric vehicle, a Nissan Leaf. The Steamboat Pilot & Today reports that business teacher Jeff Troeger leased the car for two years, although he doesn’t really expect to take it outside of city limits. The closest town of any size, Craig, is an 82-mile round trip, which is probably beyond the range of the car.
How much he will actually use it in town is also questionable. The newspaper’s Tom Ross notes that the professor customarily bikes to and from his duties at Colorado Mountain College.
Snowmass asked to join Mountain Partnership
SNOWMASS VILLAGE – The Snowmass Town Council this week was being asked to join the U.N. Mountain Partnership. The 200 members already include Park City, Aspen and Telluride.
Representatives tell the Aspen Daily News that there would be no requirement that the town officially join the collective, but it would collaborate with other members. Just what sort of collaboration is unclear, except that the group is focused on voicing its concern about the effects of climate change in higher-elevation areas.
– Allen Best
In this week's issue...
- January 25, 2024
- Bagging it
State plastic bag ban is in full effect, but enforcement varies
- January 26, 2024
- Paper chase
The Sneer is back – and no we’re not talking about Billy Idol’s comeback tour.
- January 11, 2024
- High and dry
New state climate report projects continued warming, declining streamflows