Uranium Drive-In: A Documentary
Pine River Valley Bank is proud to show the work of Brenda Grajeda and her one woman show “72 degrees and Sunny”
“My desire is to express in the abstract the imagery I see in nature; patterns, surface elements, space and the seasonal shifts of vibrancy”
DURANGO, COLORADO
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Excerpt From Peter Lev’s Mountaineering Memoir ‘The Next Pitch”
Dave Carman (recent Ridgway local) and I developed and ran guide training courses at Exum for aspiring guides in 1970’s before the current national certification programs took hold. The photo above is on the summit of Mt. Owen during an early season guides training course, with the North Face of Grand Teton in background. We also developed the rock climbing program, along with Kanzler, at Minnesota Outbound School in the late 1960’s. I ended my guiding career at Exum in 2005, and continued on as a Director and partner until 2009. Dave and I officially retired together from Exum in 2009. This occasion called for a big bash at the Climbers Ranch, in summer 2009.
I entered the American Alpine Club in Golden late one evening into it’s reference room with a “Do Not Remove” sign, to read Peter Lev’s only print copy of “The Next Pitch” given to the AAC. It’s really an incredible slice of history tracing his youthful climbs, many international expeditions/avalanche forecasting days through his time as guide, director and partner in Exum Mountain Guides. Peter’s clarity of words/ideas and his empahsis and belief in mentors and mentoring was a cool refreshment.
Maybe someday, ‘The Next Pitch’ will be in chapbook (a book of popular ballads, stories) form so the many admirers in the mountaineering audience can enjoy a truly colorful history of this pioneer.
J.R.
May Day-International Worker’s Day
International Workers’ Day is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. The police were trying to disperse a public assembly during a general strike for the eight-hour workday, when an unidentified person threw a bomb at them. The police reacted by firing on the workers, killing four demonstrators.
‘Layton Kor is Dead’……CLIMBING……”I was fortunate to have spent a couple of climbs with Layton as a youngster in the early 70′s (Nineteen).” J.R.
Layton Kor and his son Arlan in Eldorado Canyon, Colorado, in 2012. Photo by Cameron Burns
4/22/13 – Layton Kor, one of the most prolific and accomplished American climbers of the 1960s, has died at age 74. Kor had suffered from kidney failure and prostate cancer. A resident of Kingman, Arizona, he died during the night of April 21.
Kor’s name was virtually synonymous with Colorado climbing during the late 1950s and ’60s. Starting as a teenager in Eldorado Canyon, he put up many of the sandstone canyon’s most famous and enduring classics, both free and aid, including Ruper(5.8+), Rosy Cruxifiction (5.10), The Naked Edge (5.11), and many, many more. He also did dozens of first ascents in Boulder Canyon, the Flatirons, Lumpy Ridge, Glenwood Canyon, and many other crags in Colorado. Original Kor pitons are still discovered today on obscure crags throughout the state.
Kor on the cover of Climbing No. 2 (1970), leading the Salathé Wall in Yosemite.
Branching into the mountains and beyond, Kor did many new routes in Rocky Mountain National Park, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the desert Southwest (Castleton Tower, the Titan, Standing Rock), and Yosemite Valley (south face of Washington Column, West Buttress of El Capitan). He took his skills to foreign mountains on walls like the southeast face of Proboscis in Canada’s Northwest Territories and the Harlin Directissima on the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland.
Kor was still climbing into his early 70s, including the first ascent of a 150-foot tower in Arizona with friends Stewart Green, Dennis Jump, and Ed Webster. Cameron Burns, who is writing a biography on Kor, said, “If Layton got a nickel for every person who ever climbed one of his routes, he’d have been a wealthy man.”
A new edition of Kor’s classic book Beyond the Vertical, edited by Stewart Green with newly scanned photos, will be out in June.
Click here to read a Brendan Leonard guide to seven great Kor routes, both famous and lesser-known, from Climbing 291.
Date of death: April 21, 2013
Thousands Trek To New Mexico Chapel On Good Friday
Driving in northern New Mexico requires special caution on Good Friday. Tens of thousands of people — some walking all night — are converging on the village of Chimayo to pray inside a 200-year-old chapel before a carved wooden image of Jesus.
As it does every year, the highway department has put out portable toilets, orange barriers, and signs warning motorists of “Santuario walkers.”
New Mexico has been deeply, expressively Catholic ever since the conquistador Juan de Onate, accompanied by Franciscan missionaries, made his way along this same route 415 years ago. Today, this pilgrimage looks more like something you’d find in Spain or Latin America.
The faithful — with rucksacks and water bottles — hike beside sand hills freckled with pinyon pine and juniper, with the snowcapped Sangre de Cristos in the distance.
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How Did Thanksgiving End Up On The Fourth Thursday?
President Roosevelt celebrating Thanksgiving with polio patients at the Warm Springs Foundation for Infantile Paralysis Sufferers the Friday after the national holiday in 1938.
In 1789, President Washington declared Thurs., Nov. 26, as a “Day of Publick Thanksgivin,” according to the National Archives. But in the years following, the date for the holiday was announced by presidential proclamation and celebrated on various days and months. When President Lincoln made his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, the last Thursday of November became standard.
Then came the big date dispute of 1939 when two Thanksgiving holidays were observed.
You see, according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, a five-Thursday November fell in 1933 and some retailers asked President Roosevelt to move the holiday up a week.
A snippet of a 1933 letter from the Downtown Association of Los Angeles asking President Roosevelt to push back Thanksgiving by a week.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum
The president denied the request and Americans ate their turkey on the last Thursday as always in 1933.
But, Roosevelt was president for a long time, long enough for another five Thursday November to roll around in 1939. Once again, some business leaders asked if the date for the holiday could be a week earlier to give people more time to shop for Christmas, and this time Roosevelt agreed to do it. This raised a hue and cry as many people felt that he was catering to large retailers so they could make more money.
A few governors decided their states would have Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of the month as usual and that’s how some people ended up celebrating it a week earlier or later than others. For two years.
President Roosevelt stuck with the second-to-last Thursday schedule, some states stuck with the last Thursday of the month schedule and finally on Dec. 26, 1941, Congress passed a law making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November.
Now you have a story to tell over Thanksgiving dinner. You’re welcome.
Hurricane Isaac lumbered ashore late Tuesday and continued to batter the Gulf Coast.
Governor Hickenlooper Announces Ouray County Commissioner
Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2012 - Gov. John Hickenlooper announced today the appointment of Patrick Willits to serve as Ouray County’s District 3 Commissioner, filling a vacancy created by the resignation of Heidi Albritton on Aug. 14.
Section 1-12-206(4) of the Colorado Constitution states that “if the vacating commissioner is unaffiliated, then a registered unaffiliated successor shall be appointed by the governor, acting as a vacancy committee, within 10 days after the vacancy.”
Willits, who has been registered as an Unaffiliated voter since 2011, is currently the executive director of The Trust for Land Restoration, a position he has held since 1999. He previously has served as Mayor of the Town of Ridgway and as a San Miguel River Ranger for the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management. Previously, he has held positions at The Nature Conservancy, Nichols Expeditions, Eldora Mountain Resort and Boulder Valley School District. Willits earned a bachelor’s degree from San Diego State University.
LETTER FROM PAT WILLITS
Friends
I was thrilled to receive a call from the Governor’s office yesterday afternoon informing me of my appointment to complete Heidi’s term as County Commissioner. I am honored to have been selected by the Governor, but also realize that I do not yet serve with a voter mandate and feel a deep responsibility to the citizens of Ouray County to continue in Heidi’s footsteps as a voice of reason on the BOCC. We’re lucky. We live in one of the most special places in all of the United States, and it is our job to keep it that way.
THANK YOU to the many of you who expressed your support for my appointment to the Governor’s office, and thanks for the many calls, notes and greetings on the street over the last couple of weeks offering words of both wisdom and laughter. What a great group of people you are all. I am going to now need your support, thoughts and friendship more than ever. My life and workload just ratcheted up another notch and I am so grateful you are along with me for the ride.
Best regards
Pat
PS: Thanks to the good work of my friend Traci Kindred Schalow, the Pat Willits website is now up and running at http://www.patwillits.com/ . It’s bare-bones and basic at this point, but we’ll be adding much more content over the next couple of weeks. Check it out when you get a chance, and let us know what you’d like to see us do to improve it.
Dick Dorworth
a life on skis, adventures on the mountain & in the mind, on & off the page…..
My friend Dick Dorworth just started a blog, http://www.dickdorworth.com/ Dick is a philosopher, skier, mountain wanderer, writer and practicing buddhist. Take a trip with him. He’s just to the right under FAVORITE SITES. Enjoy….
Cyclists’ Thigh-Popping Success Starts in the Quad
To cycling teams and their support staffs, large thighs are less an Olympic oddity and more a necessity specific to their sport.
- Chris Hoy
Great Britain, Cycling – Track
Robert Forstemann of Germany rode the track during Day 6 of the London Games.
The size of those thighs invited comparisons to large, cylindrical objects like barrels, telephone poles and ham hocks. Each thigh, on its own, seemed bigger than a female Olympic gymnast.
The image, a try-this-on-for-thighs comparison between one German cyclist nicknamed Gorilla (Andre Greipel) and another nicknamed Mr. Thigh (Robert Förstemann), underscored a more serious notion. Namely that cyclists, particular track sprinters, rely on quadriceps, in all their massive, veined glory, to power them to success. Förstemann’s thighs, each comparable to a watermelon, measured 34 inches — wider than his waist.
“The picture is definitely real,” said Benjamin Sharp, the high-performance endurance director for USA Cycling. “Cyclists have strange shapes: big quads, small waists and big butts. It’s hard to find pants.”
He paused, then added, “It’s funny we’re talking about this.”
Olympic track cycling started Thursday, inside the velodrome, where seemingly everything, including the design of the arena, the track inside and the athletes’ helmets, emphasized the sleek and the slim. Everything, that is, except the thick, bulky and somewhat frightening quadriceps of the competitors.
To cycling teams and their support staffs, this is less an Olympic oddity and more a necessity specific to their sport. The British track cyclist Chris Hoy, who collected his fifth career gold medal in the men’s team sprint Thursday, noted recently that his thighs measured 27 inches, or size 8 for a woman’s waist. Of course, Hoy can also cover a kilometer on his bicycle in under a minute.
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Jorge Gardner–July 19, 2008
Hard to believe that 4 years have passed since Jorge took the other path. We surely miss your big grin, shining eyes and positive life force. Always leading by example. The world could use a little more of it. We miss you Jorge..
Running With The Bulls, But The Fear Is Financial
As a journalist, I came to Pamplona to see if Spain’s dismal economy would dampen the spirit of the country’s biggest summertime festival, the running of the bulls. Spaniards take their partying very seriously, and if there were even a hint of melancholy in their chants of “Viva San Fermin!” it might mean the economy devils had won.
But I have to admit to a selfish motive as well — a curiosity and romance for the festival, popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. Reading it at school 20 years ago, I was enchanted by the dance of life and death that bullfighting meant for Hemingway, the carefree romantic collisions of his characters and the medieval passageways of Pamplona where it all took place — stuff I couldn’t get in the American suburbs. I eventually became an expat journalist, perhaps still chasing the life of the novel’s main character.
Running With The Bulls
The actual running-with-the-bulls part of San Fermin takes less than five minutes each morning at 8 a.m., but it’s the most famous part of the festival. And I figured, I’m here — so why not?
I ran in sandals, with my microphone shoved under my shirt. It’s not at all like what you see on TV. In a pack of thousands, I didn’t come close to any of the bulls. My biggest fear was being vomited on by my fellow runners, most of whom had been out all night partying while I slept blissfully in my soundproof hotel room.
The drunkest of the would-be runners get eliminated by police who scan the crowd for people who look like they might be a hazard to themselves. You have to line up by 6:30 a.m. and put on your best sober face. The diehard adrenaline junkies stay closest to where the bulls are let loose — in two batches of six each. Those of us with less machismo get pushed up to the front, where we run ahead and hope the bulls never catch up to us.
A rocket goes off and you sprint. You feel heavy breaths on the back of your neck and hope it’s just the beefy guy behind you and not a bull. My microphone records one long, over-modulated scream. After less than a half-mile, we all dump out into the Plaza de Toros — the bull ring. Someone splashes a beer over my head. We survived.
It’s Been A Year……..
A year has come and gone and much has happened to make us grateful, but the most impactful for many of us was losing brother Bean Bowers when he took another path July 10, 2011. We think of you often and surely miss you Bean. Salude! Jerry
Django preps me for
Suite 102 salon
Riding With the Big Boys in the French Alps by Peter Shelton
RIDING FOR DZI – Members of the Studio Velo cycling team, including dZi Foundation board member Bill Keller (second from right), will be riding for the Ridgway-based charity in France at the end of July. dZi president Jim Nowak (not pictured) says the corporate pro-am event, Les Trois Etapes, will traverse three of the most iconic stages of the Tour de France and raise $1.5 million for a dozen charities worldwide.
RIDGWAY – Jim Nowak was still vibrating a few days after his presentation in London.
The co-founder and president of Ridgway’s dZi Foundation had been invited to give his “Revitalize a Village” PowerPoint talk to a standing-room-only crowd of philanthropists, financiers and cycling aficionados – including major players with Lloyds of London, Eurosport television and 2008 Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre – on the 31st floor of a London office tower. The occasion was the “launch” of Les Trois Etapes, a new charity road-racing event coming up at the end of July.
Teams of amateur and professional riders will traverse three of the iconic mountain stages of the Tour de France, Nowak said, including the Alpe d’Huez, the Col du Galibier and the Col de la Madeleine. And in the process raise £1 million ($1.5 million) for a dozen charities worldwide, including dZi.
It’s rarefied fundraising air for what Nowak called “by far the smallest and most remote” charity on the list. (dZi partners with villagers in some of the most isolated regions of Nepal to improve basic infrastructure: water, toilets, schools and sustainable agriculture; other charities benefiting from Trois Etapes largesse include international heavyweights Right to Play and World Bicycle Relief.) Nowak, who had just been preparing to drywall a garage apartment behind his Ridgway home, a project he has been working on virtually alone for a couple of years, was still awed by the guest list, and by the possibilities.
………………………….READ THE ARTICLE…………………………
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Jerry Roberts
