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­ ­ ­ Bring back grizzly bears to the Sierra?

TRUCKEE, Calif. – California’s state flag has a grizzly bear on it, but the grizzlies that inspired it disappeared from California in the 1920s. Does that need to remain the case?

The Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group, wants the federal government to expand its recovery plan for grizzly bears to California and several places across the West.

“If we’re serious about recovering grizzly bears, we need more populations around the West and more connections between them, so they don’t fall prey to inbreeding and so they have a chance of adapting to a warming world,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

The group calls for reintroduction of grizzly bears into the southern Sierra Nevada in California but also Utah’s Uinta Mountains, a range stretching eastward from Park City toward Dinosaur National Park.

The Grand Canyon could also use some grizzlies, the group says, as would the Mogollon Rim and Gila Wilderness complex in Arizona and New Mexico.

As many as 100,000 grizzly bears once lived in western North America. Now, there are 1,850 in the United States.

How realistic is the reintroduction to California? The Sierra Sun talked to Ann Bryant, who directs the Lake Tahoe-based BEAR League. “(People) can’t even co-exist with black bears,” she said. “How in the world do we think we can co-exist with grizzlies. There’s just no room, no mentality for it.”

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The cost of preserving Telluride’s past

TELLURIDE – What price history? That’s the question before Telluride as it faces a deadline next spring if it is to avert demolition of the Pandora Mill.

The mill was at the center of the town’s mining economy from the 1920s until the mid-1970s. It once processed ores for lead, zinc, gold and other metals and in 1974, the last year of profitability, employed 500 people. This was just a year after the ski lifts of Telluride began operating.

The mill sits a mile or so east of downtown Telluride at the end of the box canyon, a place wondrous in its visual appeal. But to restore it will cost at least $30,000 for an engineering assessment, probably more. Then the real work will begin. But the site is too contaminated to be easily adapted to affordable housing or public meeting space, notes the Telluride Daily Planet.

“It’s not a clean site by any stretch of the imagination,” historical commission member John Wontrobski said.

Still, he wants to see the three-level, steel-framed structure saved, as ordinary as it is. “I’m a believer that you need to remember our history, both the good and the bad. And that’s what I think the Idarado mill represents,” he said, using the name of the mining company that operated the Pandora Mill.

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For now, it’s Kit Carson Park in Taos

TAOS, N.M. – Kit Carson’s name is littered across the landscape of the Southwest.

Colorado has 14,170-foot Kit Carson Peak, plus a Kit Carson County abutting the Kansas border and then a town called Kit Carson. He died in eastern Colorado in 1868, at the hamlet of Boggsville, a wisp of a place along the Arkansas River.

But he is buried in New Mexico, along with his third wife, Josefa Jaramillo Carson, in a central park in downtown Taos that is named after him. That may well change.

Many people have long vilified Carson for his role in a brutal military campaign against Navajo Indians in the 1860s.

It is, as the Santa Fe New Mexican noted in a June report, among a series of objections registered in the Southwest stemming from the four centuries of European-based settlement.

In 1998, a vandal or vandals sawed off the right foot of a bronze sculpture of Don Juan de Oñate at a cultural center named after the conquistador in northern New Mexico. Statues of other conquistadors in Santa Fe have been defaced and spray-painted with the words “murderer” and “killer.”

Carson was a mountain man and fur trapper who plied the rivers of the West. He had two Indian wives and, despite being illiterate, spoke many Indian languages. In the 1840s and 1850s he guided several of the explorers in John Charles Fremont’s expeditions to California. He was a legend in his own time, the stuff of dime-store novels, although he was clearly brave and led an extraordinary life.

By the 1860s, a legacy of conflict remained in the Southwest, and the United States enlisted Carson to lead a military campaign to force the rebellious Navajo into submission. Defeated, they were forced in what was called a Long March to a reservation in southeastern New Mexico.

Because of that episode, many in Taos think that Carson should not be honored. The City Council in June voted to rename the 17-acre park “Red Willow Park.” But the Taos Pueblo Tribal Council objected that the name belongs to them. They call themselves the Red Willow People.

So now, according to The Taos News, the name is uncertain. Councilman Andrew Gonzales thinks it’s a non-issue. “The big backlash that I’m getting from this community is ‘Don’t we have bigger fish to fry beyond the renaming of the park?’” he said.

A supporter of a changed name conceded that doing so would do little to resolve long-standing racial and cultural divides.

“The problem we have with bigotry or intolerance or any of those issues or conflict between cultures are not going to be settled by the naming of the park,” Councilman Fred Peralta told the newspaper.

In its June article, The New Mexican probed the anger inherent in the desire to change the name and whether it is justified. “He was a murderer,” said one local resident, a member of the Taos Pueblo.

Hampton Sides, who wrote the best-seller, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, offered a nuanced view. “History is messy and fraught with contradictions,” he said. “So far as my own research could discover, he was a friend to all the Pueblos. Certainly, he was no Indian hater.”

But it was indeed war, he said. “It was war that had its genesis in centuries of brutal raiding and kidnapping between the Navajos and the Spanish, a cycle of violence that the U.S. Army was seeking, in its own flawed way, to end.”

Even the greatest of our leaders have been deeply flawed, he said, pointing to Abraham Lincoln, who “personally signed the orders approving the Navajo war that Kit Carson reluctantly led.”

On The Taos News website, comments ran in both directions. One writer with deep roots and a family tree that included Kit Carson’s last wife nonetheless suggested a Catholic priest of the 1800s who did much good in the community as a namesake.

But if Carson’s name is to be jettisoned from the park, where does it stop? Kit Carson Electric is the local electrical supplier and the ski area is located on Carson National Forest.

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African tortoises bear i-Pads in exhibit

ASPEN – Aspen’s new $45 million art museum debuted to the public over the weekend. It also opened with controversy.

The most controversial exhibit was one conceived by New York-based artist Cai Guo-Qiang. It features three African tortoises carrying iPads on their backs. The title of that exhibit is “Moving Ghost Town.” What it has to do with ghost towns was not clear from descriptions.

Some charged animal abuse, although a veterinarian retained to monitor the tortoises found nothing of the sort.

“In my professional opinion, the tortoises have adapted well to their new habitat, and the iPads have not interfered in any way with their natural behavior,” Dr. Elizabeth Kremzier said in a statement posted on the Aspen Art Museum Facebook page.

Of course, how natural can it get on the roof-top deck of a 47-foot building in downtown Aspen?

A Denver Post art critic raved that the four-story, 17,000-square-foot museum is a “modern wonder.” It was designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who won this year’s Pritzker Prize, the profession’s highest award. “He is roundly respected and for good reason,” Post critic Ray Mark Rinaldi said of Ban, “His structures are delicate and precise, beautiful to look at and reasoned in ways people can understand.”

Mimicking the experience of the ski mountain a few blocks away, visitors can first march up the 57 stairs (or take a glass elevator) then descend through the four floors of exhibits.

“From a distance, the structure looks like a giant wicker trunk, which is likely to keep its design controversial,” Rinaldi wrote. “Still, it manages to be sleek and warm at the same time, thoughtful and monumental, like a museum wants to be.” But, he added, it is not one for traditionalists.

For some time, sly mentions of the museum’s wood-latticed exterior have been showing up in the Aspen newspaper. “Pigeon’s roost” is one oblique reference.

Last week, letter-writers in the Aspen newspapers continued to debate the merits of the architecture.

“The function of this box doesn’t serve the art or the visitor” huffed Ziska Childs, describing the work as contrary to the work of renowned architects Frank Lloyd Wright and the locally remembered Fritz Benedict, a 10th Mountain Division veteran.

“This art museum box has nothing to do with either a natural form or the natural setting.”

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Skier fined $447,000 in collision

KETCHUM, Idaho – A district court in Idaho has issued a $447,000 judgment against a man who hit another downhill skier from behind on the slopes of the Sun Valley resort last year.

Taking note of the hefty figure, the Idaho Mountain Express says that the message is loud and clear “that skiing too fast, losing control and injuring another person is not only not acceptable, it’s punishable in a court of law.”

The decision shows that responsibility for avoiding collision rests with the person who is uphill.

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Heartburn in Tetons on short-term rentals

JACKSON, Wyo. – Jackson and Teton were in a mini-uproar in recent weeks as the result of a decision by local governments to start enforcing a law adopted in 1994. That law bans short-term rentals in residential districts.

The law was so widely overlooked that one company, Clear Creek, was in the sole business of helping rent privates homes, 52 of them. All but one are illegal rentals under the law.

The Jackson Hole News&Guide says some are gauging that local governments are trampling on private property rights. But another interesting issue is whether the homes in question meet standards of the International Building Code designed for short-term rentals. It seems that few, if any, would comply.

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Welcoming drilling rigs instead of despising them

STEAMBAOT SPRINGS – Colorado has been engaged this year in what many call the fracking war. As oil and gas drilling has expanded rapidly during recent years along the state’s Northern Front Range, hostilities have escalated into what appeared sure to be a giant battle at the November election with dueling ballot initiatives. Many millions of dollars were already allocated for 15- and 30-second television sound bites.

The Niobrara formation has been one of the sources of this oil and gas, and it also exists west of Steamboat Springs, in the state’s northwest corner. But there, at least in Craig, located 42 miles west of Steamboat, the drilling rigs are embraced.

A company called Southwestern Energy has purchased $234 million in leases this year. Just a handful of drilling operations are planned at this point.

“I hope they strike it rich,” Moffat County Commissioner John Kinkaid told the Steamboat Today.

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When offices have wine rooms, massage tables

ASPEN – When is a penthouse a home – or an office? That’s the question raised in Aspen where Marc Bern, an attorney, purchased the penthouse atop an old building in downtown for $6.27 million.

On the second floor of the building, below his penthouse, Bern has what he insists is an office. Zoning in downtown Aspen permits second-floor offices, but not homes. The city doesn’t want high-priced residential real estate to displace the town’s commercial sector.

The city government won’t give him a certificate of occupancy. Chris Bendon, the city’s community development director, says he believes the office is really an extension of Bern’s residence. As evidence, he points to a wine room and a massage table in the office.

Bern said that these are simply items that didn’t fit into the penthouse and further challenges the city to point to regulations that specifically exclude such things as wine coolers and massage tables from offices.

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More hydroelectric on irrigation canal

MONTROSE – Efforts to make electricity from fast-flowing irrigation waters continue east of Montrose. The waters are diverted from the Gunnison River through a tunnel, and when they emerge they flow downhill rapidly and with great energy.

For a century the idea was talked about, and a few years ago the Delta-Montrose Electrical Association completed a small hydroelectric plant on the canal, which delivers water to farms and orchards.

Now, according to The Telluride Watch, a fourth installation is being planned. It would, during irrigation season, produce up to 4.8 megawatts of hydropower.