Legacy of the atomic age dismantled

NUCLA – You can scratch the dam on Tabeguache Creek off the list. It was just 6 feet tall and 60 feet wide, but an impediment to a trio of endangered fish on the San Miguel River trying to reach cooler water for spawning.

This is 70 miles west of Telluride, where mountains merge into the red-rock canyons of western Colorado. Sedimentary rocks there are rich with uranium and vanadium. Madame Curry spent time there with her husband, Pierre, at the start of the atomic age. Ore was extracted for use in the Manhattan project during World War II. A mill operated from the 1920s until 1984, and a company town called Uravan was created. That is why the creek was dammed, to provide water for the community.

That was then. A $120 million Superfund cleanup was conducted from 1987 - 2007, and there’s not much to see now, not even a faint glow, except for roadside historical panels.

But the remaining dam prevented roundtail chubs, flannel-mouth suckers and bluehead suckers from reaching the colder waters for spawning.

The Telluride Daily Planet explains that the Bureau of Land Management, with help from the San Miguel Watershed Coalition and Nature Conservancy, dismantled the dam in March.

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Objection to ski area search by lawmen

TAOS, N.M. – A crackdown by federal law agents in the parking lot of the Taos Ski Valley distressed locals.

The Taos News explains that four law agents of the U.S. Forest Service took a drug-sniffing dog for a tour of the ski area’s parking lot while also stopping vehicles along State Road 150. The lawmen issued 13 citations, including five for possession of marijuana and one for illegal possession of prescription drugs, and also issued summonses for traffic violations.

“People felt threatened, bullied and because of this intimidation, felt violated and that they had no choice but to comply,” wrote Neal King, mayor of the Taos Ski Valley, a municipality, in a March 4 letter to the Forest Service.

Town officials further tell the Taos New that they don’t deny the right of the Forest Service to enforce laws on its property, which includes the ski area’s parking lot. But if there’s a next time, they want a lighter touch. The agents seemed to have an imperious air to them.

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Doctor dies after fall on an icy route

VAIL – James McGrogan was a 39-year-old emergency room physician near South Bend, Ind., who had set out for the Eiseman Hut, in the 10th Mountain Hut Division.

The trail from Vail sidles past Bald Mountain and is well marked and well used. Somehow, he got off the trail. By simply going downhill, he would have returned to the trail – and to Vail. Instead, he kept going.

Several weeks after his disappearance, and after thousands of hours spent by searchers looking in the wrong places, his body was found. The Vail Daily says that he had crossed a ridge and into another drainage where he slipped and fell. Eagle County coroner Kara Bettis concluded that the doctor died of multiple injuries.

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Water, climate refugees and growth

ASPEN – If you want to get into an argument in Colorado, just go to a ski town and suggest that Denver and other cities along the Front Range deserve all the water they take from the mountain headwaters.

In fact, water is almost entirely spoken for in Colorado, and some contend not nearly enough has been left in creeks and rivers for fish, kayakers and other purposes that have nothing to do with suburban lawns. Now comes continued discussion of how another transmountain diversion project might look.

Writing a letter to the Aspen Daily News, Barb Coddington warned that Denver-area cities had better not talk about taking more water until they learn to use it more carefully. “There are a whole lot of serious conservation actions that have not been taken, or even seriously talked about, for the Front Range,” she wrote.

Au contraire, responded Dave Merritt, a water engineer and a director of a key Western Slope water entity. “The Western Slope stands to learn a lot from the water conservation efforts on the Front Range,” he wrote, citing a passel of statistics that sort-of, maybe, backed up his contention.

Coddinton had the last word, in yet another letter warning of future climate refugees moving to Colorado from Texas, Arizona and eventually Mexico and other places. They really aren’t welcome in Colorado, she added.

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Marking 3 decades of Aspen cannabis

ASPEN – Colorado has been much in the news this year because of the legalization of marijuana. Aspen, perhaps more so than other ski towns, has long had a live-and-let-live attitude toward drugs, including cannabis.

With that as the backdrop, the Aspen Daily News announced in an April Fool’s spoof that local officials were commemorating the 30th anniversary of legalized marijuana in “Prick’in County.”

To mark the anniversary, reported the News, “officials are opening a new pot-smoking porch at the Prick’in County Jail, adjacent to the facility’s yoga studio and massage parlor.”

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Paving of Cottonwood Pass has to wait

CRESTED BUTTE – The east side of Cottonwood Pass, from Buena Vista to the 12,126-foot summit, is paved. But the road on the west side, toward Gunnison and Crested Butte, is not.

The U.S. government’s Department of Transportation would like to change that. The Crested Butte News explains that the federal agency believes the gravel roads need to be widened to accommodate the summer traffic. The pass is not plowed in winter.

This widening and paving of 5 miles near the top would cost $16.2 million. Gunnison County’s share would be $3.8 million – and while likely someday, say county officials, the money isn’t there now.

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Oprah reinvests in Mountain Village

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE – Oprah Winfrey has purchased about 60 acres of land in Mountain Village, the slope-side town adjacent to Telluride. The Telluride Watch reports a purchase price of $10.85 million and growing confidence in the return of a more robust real estate market.

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Big quake not omen of an apocalypse

WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont. – The largest earthquake in 34 years in Yellowstone National Park caused some goods to fall from store shelves in late March, but that was about the extent of the damage. The West Yellowstone News reports that experts were nonplussed about the rumble that registered a magnitude of 4.8 on the Richter scale.

“There were no injuries, there was no damage. Some people who lived a few miles away didn’t even feel the earthquake,” said Al Nash, spokesman for the Yellowstone National Park. “It’s just part of the geologic situation we find here in Yellowstone.”

In West Yellowstone and Gardiner, two gateway towns midway between the quake epicenter, residents reported the earthquake was like a truck driving by.

As Yellowstone lies over a huge caldera of volcanism, it’s conceivable, even likely, that someday there will be a gigantic explosion. But experts have said it’s not likely any time soon.

Nonetheless, the earthquake was sufficiently unsettling to some that Nash put out a YouTube video entitled “Rumor Control” to explain the earthquake and animal migration.

“We do have bison, elk, and other animals that have moved outside the park recently, but they’re doing that because it’s the depth of winter and food is hard to find in places in Yellowstone,” Nash told the News.

Major earthquakes have hit Yellowstone. A 7.5-magnitude quake in 1959 caused a portion of a mountain northwest of the park to give way, the debris damming the Madison River in Montana and forming a lake. That quake caused the death of 28 people.

– Allen Best

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Cats get bigger, one Schnauzer at a time

REVELSTOKE, B.C. – Somebody’s Schnauzer got nabbed by a cougar at a home along the Trans-Canada Highway, adjacent to Mountain Revelstoke National Park. It fits in with a bigger theme.

According to the Revelstoke Times-Review, the owner let the dog into the back yard, then heard it barking. Summoned inside, the dog refused. Bad decision – the Schnauzer was soon off to the big bone in the sky.

At about the same time, Kyle Knopff was giving a lecture along the TransCanada, 191 miles to the east in Canmore, talking about how cougar populations in western Canada have been expanding.

Cougars, also called mountain lions and pumas, have the largest range of any land mammal in the Americas, said Knopff. With the settlement of European-based people, they were hunted as varmints. Alberta did a particularly effective job in eliminating cougars from the landscapes, and a bounty that was in place until 1964 had a role in that.

“But they are now bouncing back,” Knopff said. “We have had changing human perception of large carnivores, and that is a big part of it.”

In a study Knopff conducted in Clearwater County, between Jasper National Park and Red Deer, Alberta, he and his wife, Aliah, collared the lions and tracked their movement between the mountains and the agriculture-dominated landscape on the plains.

“What we found, really, is that cougars tended to avoid human features on the landscape a little bit,” he said. They avoided pipelines, buildings and roads, he added, but were found in edge habitat where forests meet clearings. “The reason they like that is that is where the ungulates are.”

If cougars pose little risk to humans, said Knopff, “they still are a consummate predator.”

“Can we tolerate them? How close are we willing to live with these actually dangerous large carnivores?” he asked rhetorically.

While cougars are wary of humans, dogs – not so much. To avoid conflict and coexist with cougars, he added, it’s best to restrict pedestrian access to wildlife corridors and keep dogs on leash.

And sometimes out of the backyard.

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Bans considered on plastic bags & idling

CANMORE, Alberta – Mountain resort towns continue to be at the front edge of environmental legislation and social agendas. In Alberta, Canmore officials are moving forward on a law that would ban idling of motor vehicles. In Park City, town officials are sizing up how to crimp the proliferation of throw-away plastic shopping bags. Neither are the first to consider such legislation, but rather figure into a broad trend.

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Anxiety may grow on flooding anniversary

CANMORE, Alberta – Last summer, first Alberta and then Colorado got hammered by severe rains that caused extensive flooding.

The storms were similar in that both systems picked up rain in the Gulf of Mexico and then moved north. As Colorado’s came at summer’s end, between hurricanes, it had more moisture, with some locations along the northern Front Range getting 14 to 18 inches in just a few days.

But Alberta got plenty drenched in June, and one of those places was near the entrance to Banff National Park, where Cougar Creek churned through Canmore. Only two homes were lost, but dozens more had water flowing against foundations.

Calls to crisis lines were up 10 to 15 percent in the aftermath of last year’s floods in Alberta, says Dr. Michael Trew, the chief mental health officer for Alberta Health Services. Depression, anxiety and drug abuse sometime increase after a disaster.

 “One of the amazing things when people are faced with disaster is, we forget what we know,” he told the Rocky Mountain Outlook. “We have to look after ourselves, and if there’s a blessing with this kind of experience, it’s that people realize we really are not alone. There’s a certain reassurance in that.”

– Allen Best

More Mountain Town News can be found at www.mountaintownnews.net