New Kids on the Block, Part 2

The town won its case against Don Nordlander and his mining equipment across the street from us on South Cora. We didn’t have to testify.

Solving the Hot Dog Problem

It wasn’t that Vince Kontny was being impolite. He was just busy solving the hot dog problem.

Hidden High Grade

In the compressor house next door to the mine portal they gave us yellow hard hats and waterproof rain jackets. Then we climbed aboard the trammer and straddled its hard metal bench. A tour guide who calls himself Rock Chip swung up on the engine, and the trammer clanked and jerked into the tunnel. The light of the outside world, the warm summer sunlight of Ouray, quickly shrank to a silver dollar behind us, then vanished altogether.

A Bear Creek Chess Game

OK, let us review.

A year ago, the setup seemed, to a casual observer, pretty simple. The Telluride Ski and Golf Company introduced the idea of expanding the ski area into upper Bear Creek. The resort operator needed to update its master plan with the U.S. Forest Service anyway and began a process which included surveying local skiers on how they imagined their ski area of the future. Telski had already gained USFS permission to do snow and avalanche studies off the back side of Gold Hill and had secured a Forest Service permit to guide skiers into the terrain in question.

Telski CEO Dave Riley assumed an ostensibly neutral position on expansion; he was just asking for input. Though it was also perhaps clear from Riley’s enthusiastic spearheading of a new, Euro-style off-piste persona for Telluride – including the opening of steep terrain within the existing boundaries and new exit gates into public lands beyond – that his heart’s desire, most likely, was an expansion into the alpine cirques of upper Bear Creek.

Colorado Water: Waiting for the Call

When it comes to water, there are three kinds of people.

The first kind turn on the faucet and think nothing of it. Hose down the driveway. Soak the lawn. Have too much fun in the shower.

An old man rewrote my Wiki page

I, Scott McInnis, have been accused recently of going in and altering my Wikipedia profile. This is a non-issue. If I weren’t running for Governor of Colorado, nobody would have even noticed. I mean, nobody would have even bothered to look and thought that they saw some things that, you know, might not have been actually original thinking.

A View from the Hill

I’m walking up the hill behind our house. Colona Hill some people call it. Or Colona Mountain. Though that may be too exalted a word for a remnant shale knob 7,100 feet above sea level in plain view of the saw-tooth Cimarron Ridge and the still-snowy San Juans to the south.

Hopi chants and ski sacrifices

Here’s a column from November 1995, a year the snow waited until after Thanksgiving.

I rode the bike up high, up to almost 10,000 feet, and still the ground was pretty bare. I stopped and walked out on a ledge and listened for snow.

There was the sound of wind in the bare aspens down below in Beaver Creek. Or was that the creek itself? A trickle running over autumn-gray stones? Wind and water sometimes sound alike.

There was the distant grinding of cars on Dallas Divide, the sound rising and fading with the breathing of the wind. There was a jet, its muted roar reaching far in front of the shining silver seed.

A murder of crows rode the scarp’s updraft diagonally above me. Their wing feathers rustled like tissue paper. I couldn’t hear the snow coming.

Say Goodnight, Gracie

In mid-summer I got a call from a friend of Grace Herndon’s inviting Ellen and me to Grace’s 85th birthday party up at Miramonte Reservoir. I told her I was sorry, we were going to be away, and she said maybe in that case I ought to give Gracie a call soon, because they were thinking she was pretty frail and might not last much longer.

Turned out she refused to die for another three months.