Category — Living in Boulder Co

The familiar Garmin logo. (click to enlarge)

I was biking to my Sunday morning radio shift. Heading through a parking lot near KGNU, I noticed a familiar logo on a truck. It was the colors of the Garmin Transitions cycling team on a convoy of vehicles. including this one, a couple of team cars and vans. A quick Google search finds that they are parked outside the team’s Boulder offices.

I have been impressed with the Garmin team since its inception. Team Director Jonathan Vaughters has taken a serious stand against doping. And though the team suffered through a nightmare Tour de France, losing Robbie Hunter and Tyler Farrar to broken bones, the performance of Ryder Hesjedal, who rode well and wound up in seventh place, bodes well for the future.

As a huge fan of cycling, it’s nice to have one of the sport’s premier teams in town. The recent announcement that there will be a tour of Colorado next year, possibly including a ride through Boulder, is icing on the cake.

Here's the fleet. (click to enlarge)

This datura flower lasted only one night.

The datura have returned to the yard this year, more a scouting party than a full brigade. They are volunteers, and they show up in only in a small area along a stone path just at the edge of the canopy of our spruce tree, so they exist in a place where they are shaded except in the afternoons. The plant has a way of wilting when the sun is intense and then rebounding after dark.

Datura bring forth mysteriously beautiful, often short-lasting flowers that bloom at night. Besides their natural magnificence, datura, when ingested, are both hallucinogenic and toxic, with a long cultural history. I have not ingested one of the enticing flowers, and after reading several accounts of people who did, I won’t be finding out for myself. But it makes the plant even more mysterious to me.

Last summer no volunteers showed for duty, after a banner year in 2008, when we had many blooms on several plants.

But this flower lasted only one night. The afternoon sun “melted” it, and it didn’t come back.

Click here to see a shot of our 2008 bumper crop.

Click to enlarge

The clouds were low and heavy, and it was threatening to storm Saturday night just before six when I jumped in the car to pick up some scripts at the King Sooper pharmacy. When I got to the left-turn lane from Table Mesa onto Broadway, the hail started.

I tried to pull into the Conoco station, but all areas with cover were already taken. The noise was deafening – I felt like I was inside a tin can. So I made it to the parking lot and stopped beneath a couple of small trees that offered a hint of shelter. But it hadn’t been a minute since it began, and the parking lot had turned into a foaming river moving downhill toward Table Mesa Drive.

So I just sat there, got out the iPhone and took some shots.

Two minutes later, the storm lifted, and I pulled into a parking place. I had to walk over piles of hailstones to get in.

I stopped at the counter to buy a couple of Lotto tickets. The guy there grinned and said the storm had blown out the lottery machine – instantly ending any gambling urges I might have had.

I looked back at the pharmacy. It had closed while I was sitting in the car in the parking lot river.

Three strikes, and I was out of there.

A crow (top) gets ready for another pass at the turkey vulture below.

I was driving down Moorhead, waiting for the heat to come on in the Subaru, the sky flint gray with bursts of clouds running north to south, when I first saw the three black shapes.

Three birds. All pretty large. And it only took a couple of glances away from the wheel to notice that it was two crows dive-bombing a turkey vulture. I pulled over as soon as I could and jumped out of the car with my camera. They were high enough that I couldn’t hear any sounds. I’m not that great a photographer, but I managed a couple of shots, including his one, which shows the larger vulture at the bottom with its white underwing markings. The crow at the top is about half the size of the vulture, with a black undercarriage.

The birds must have found some wind thermal up there in the cold air, and the vulture was soaring in the way vultures do, flapping its wings only when necessary and sweeping across the sky on the rising current. The two crows were flying recklessly around it, coming in from different directions, their wings fluttering as they tried to swoop in close without actually hitting the much larger vulture. (Well. That’s the way it looked. There is documentation of crows attacking turkey vultures, but I’ve never been inside a bird’s brain, so perhaps they were all just enjoying themselves up in the rising air current.)

Their ever-widening circles took them away from me until they were almost out of sight in less than a minute. Jumping back into the car, just thinking about how much fun that (at least) the crows seemed to be having, and marking up my first turkey vulture sighting this early in the year made an otherwise cold, miserable day lighten up considerably.

I was on my way to meet friends for breakfast Saturday morning, riding the path that bisects CU’s east campus approaching the location called the Confluence, when something caught my eye across the lake to the west.

It was this group of turkey vultures perched high in the trees letting the morning sun warm their wings. I count 13-14 of these wonderful, huge birds. When I first saw them, at least four were opening their wings to the sun’s warmth.

I was reminded that a large group of vultures used to roost in an old cottonwood on the other side of the bike path until it fell in a storm several years ago and is now a pile of old wood.

I am always watching for turkey vultures , and I have seen a lot of them high in the air, especially on the trails near the East Boulder Rec Center, but this is my first good group sighting this year. I was late and didn’t get to spend enough time with this bunch, but what a sight. Vulture wingspans range from four to six feet, and even from this distance, you can see how enormous “buzzards” really are.

Vultures are common migratory visitors in the spring and fall along the Front Range, and provide a valuable recycling function by cleaning up carrion and carcasses otherwise left to the elements. The bald head which many consider “ugly,” is actually an adaptation to its diet, since it has to put its head inside rotting meat and feathers are bacteria-prone.

When I was a student at St. Paul’s College in Concordia, Mo. I was skinny (!), and somehow I got the nickname Henry Hawk, after a comic-book character at the time, and then Buzzard, and finally Buzzard Hank. I found this photo, circa 1966, of Buzzard Hank trying his best to look like one. Do you notice the resemblance?

Anybody can join the Bluegrass jam every Tuesday night at Oskar Blues in Lyons.

Every Tuesday night about eight o’clock they pull back the chairs in the upstairs bar at Oskar Blues and line them up in a circle. Various guitars, banjos, mandolins, dobros, fiddles and a big acoustic bass are pulled from cases, and players begin to sit down and tune up. Soon enough someone calls a song, and the Lyons Bluegrass Jam is underway.

More players arrive as the night goes on, and as diners start to leave over in the next section, some pickers standing around the edges break off and start their own circle. Sometimes upwards of fifty musicians are huddled in different circles, passing around songs. The jams generally wind down around 11, but occasionally, like one night in March when Vince Herman and his son, Silas, stopped by, the picking went on after midnight.

Seeing someone like Herman, a founder of Leftover Salmon, isn’t that unusual in this little town, now home to a growing number of world-class musicians.  Lyons and the mountain communities from here up to Nederland have quietly become a roots-music artist colony. The gypsy jazz group Taarka, Grammy-award-winning slide guitarist Sally Van Meter, the bluegrass quartet Spring Creek, bassist Sally Truitt, Elephant Revival, bassist Eric Thorin, Dave Watts from the Motet, songwriter Nancy Thorwardson, guitarist Jason Hicks of the Blue Canyon Boys, Caleb Roberts of Open Road, drummer Brian McRae, luthier and guitarist Romano Paoletti, bluesman Lionel Young, classical violinist Mintze Wu and multi-instrumentalist K.C. Groves are just a few of the many accomplished musicians living in the Lyons area.

What is curious about the jams is that despite the plethora of talent, players of all levels are encouraged to pull up a chair. “Bluegrass, by nature, is a pretty competitive music,” explains resident Eric Zilling, a jam regular. “At festivals there are contests for best fiddler, best guitarist etc. Here, everybody knows where they stand. You go around the circle, you get your opportunity to play, and then somebody from Spring Creek, who’s sitting next to you, plays. It’s a welcoming atmosphere.”

Longtime resident Dave McIntyre books music and runs the soundboard at Oskar Blues. Fresh from New Jersey, he fell in love with Lyons, at that time, he says, “a sleepy bedroom community, good-old-boy oriented place.” McIntyre, who bought a house near downtown in 1976 and has watched the music and arts scene blossom over the last dozen years, says, “Planet Bluegrass was the catalyst for people to move here.”

Craig Ferguson, who heads Planet Bluegrass, which books the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and brings high-profile national events RockyGrass and the Folks Festival and other concerts to its local stages, first moved to Lyons in 1994. “I would guess we had something to do with it, probably more to do with bringing people to experience Lyons and having them fall in love with it — like we did. Now I’d say there really are a lot of musicians in town.”

Ferguson says that the scene is “more self-generating” today. “There is so much music in town, pickin’ parties, jams, that we really have nothing to do with.”

Singer and bassist Jessica Smith relocated to Lyons with the other members of Spring Creek three years ago. “We had been in Crested Butte and knew Colorado was a good market for bluegrass,” she says. “We wanted to be closer to the Front Range so we can get to places more easily, but we didn’t want to live in the city. We had been to RockyGrass, knew of other musicians living here and decided it would be a good place for us.”

Annie Sirotniak moved here in 2007 from Boulder. “There are folks to pick with, friendships form and there’s a great vibe,” she says. Sirotniak books 4-7 shows a year through High Street Concerts, an all-volunteer consortium started in 2003 by Sam Tallent, Mike Whip and K.C. Groves. This year High Street has presented guitarist Beppe Gambetta, fiddle wizard Casey Driessen and Laurie Lewis and Tom Rozum, among others. “Profit isn’t the motive,” she says. “We have a committed volunteer crew. We’d rather put on a show and give as much as we can to the artists. I’ve been a performer as well, and know firsthand that it’s tough to make it as a musician. I guess that’s part of the reason I volunteer all my time.”

Profit isn’t the motive at the blues jams Patrick Cullie hosts each month at Oskar, or at the popular Tribute Nights that Jami Lunde manages once a month, either. Up to 20 bands each perform two or three songs from the catalogues of, so far, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Neil Young, Hank Williams (I, II or III) and Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris.

The idea, Lunde says, grew out of endless nights in living rooms and festival backstages when guitars are passed around the circle. “Oftentimes the circle will come around to cover songs,” she says, “and it ends up that we are having so much fun playing, singing, dancing.” The format has caught fire with musicians and audiences alike, making it one of Oskar’s biggest nights.

Last year several people, including Zilling and Groves, who co-hosts the bluegrass jams with Eric Thorin, started Redstone Radio, a station that streams the music of Lyons over the Internet. Zilling says the idea started at a Spring Creek show last May. “I had bought a handheld digital recorder, and I was walking around Oskar and I showed my new toy to K.C., and she started walking around interviewing people like a television reporter. It was pretty funny, and afterwards she came over and said we should start a radio station.”

The idea stuck, and working incrementally, they created Redstone Radio, an internet-only station. Without doing a lot of promotion, the station logs about 800 listener hours per month playing 80 percent local musicians and 20 percent musicians with local ties, like Herman or Tim O’Brien. Everybody gets paid for their music, and Zilling says that after a year of operation, “It’s pretty darned self-sustaining.”

Redstone recently took a further step, renovating an abandoned cinderblock building at 4th Street and Broadway. Volunteers, many of them musicians or local music fans with trade skills, are bringing the building up to code, adding drywall and converting it into the Groove Shack, which gives Redstone Radio a physical space, but more importantly, adds a rehearsal and teaching space for musicians.

The gap that usually exists between artists and fans is absent here, and the synergy between residents, fans and musicians is as organic as it is self-sustaining. “Mostly, I think that musicians attract musicians at this point,” says Ferguson. “They also seem to attract other artists, as I’ve felt that there are so many more ‘artistic’ people around now, painters, potters, you name it.”

“It’s a great little town with a great mix of people,” Smith says. “There are people whose families have been here for generations, and people like us who come for artistic reasons. Planet Bluegrass brought people who wouldn’t have come here for any other reason and settled here. And it’s still happening.”

This article appears in the Summer issue of Boulder magazine.

A coyote heads off near the Boulder Reservoir last month.

A columnist in the Denver Post today talks with some common-sense Greenwood Village residents circulating petitions to stop the killing of coyotes in their city.

After a spike in dog/human/coyote incidents, the city hired sharpshooters to kill “aggressive” coyotes with high-powered rifles within the city’s park system.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife has killed several coyotes in the city of Broomfield in response to a couple of well-publicized dog/human/coyote interactions in that city earlier this year. The DOW, which knows that killing the animals doesn’t address the problem – its spokesperson recently said that if the entire United States were paved with asphalt, we would still be living with coyotes — is instead overreacting to mostly misguided public fears that somehow “more aggressive” coyotes have become a threat to our well-being and our way of life.

These knee-jerk, appease-the-populace reactions will almost certainly guarantee that the cities will continue to experience dog/human/coyote interactions. Greenwood Village says its main goal is to educate, and to its credit has generally good advice about coyotes on its website.

But instead of vigorously enforcing current leash laws (which is the underlying reason for almost every one of these so-called “attacks”), the city has decided to blame the wild animals. It’s so much easier than actually dealing with the problem.

I think most people who have been around animals understand that most animal-behavior problems are really human-behavior problems. Even people who experience the harshest of wild-animal interactions – being mauled by a grizzly – generally understand their own culpability in an “attack.”

The word “attack” has all sorts of negative connotations. This YouTube video, for instance, is labeled as an “attack” by a polar bear. My immediate reaction to the video is that there was no attack, except perhaps that the woman could be seen as attacking the bears by jumping into their enclosure. But had the bear chosen to “attack,” the woman would certainly not be alive to tell her story. The bear, though it appears to bite her on the ass, seems more curious about the intruder than anything else.

Despite the biblical injunction about dominion over animals, humans have never been good stewards of wildlife; indeed we seem incapable of “managing” wild animals beyond exterminating them when they become nuisances.

Think of the consequences of the United States’ decision, for instance, to eliminate the top predators, wolves and grizzly bears from the entire Western ecosystem to accommodate ranchers with cattle and sheep, The consequences of that decision still reverberate across the Western landscape, with no end in sight.

One of the effects is that about half a million coyotes, along with hundreds of thousands of other animals, under the guise of “wildlife management,” are killed every year under the Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division. Despite the annual slaughter, which in 2008 was almost five MILLION animals, coyote numbers are increasing around the country, even in places that have never seen coyotes before. (For more on coyote behavior, here’s an excellent report from Marc Bekoff in Canid News.

In Colorado, the DOW and Greenwood Village council members over-reacted mostly to appease the fears of a small percentage of citizens. And instead of concentrating on human behavior (“my dog is under control, even without the leash,” “I left my leash at home,” “My dog wouldn’t hurt a fly,” “Why aren’t you out catching real criminals?”), we seem to easily defer to expecting the animals to change theirs. And if the animals, in this case coyotes, don’t comply: Bang, you’re dead.

There’s one constant in the spike in dog/human/coyote interactions in the Denver area: Off-leash dogs were involved and often initiated contact with the coyotes. The inference is, of course, that coyotes, because they’re wild, “attack” dogs, which are “tame.”

If you’ve been around animals, you know that’s not a given. The coyotes might have attacked the dogs, but it’s equally probable that the dogs, off-leash and curious as all dogs are, approached the coyotes, who, perceiving them as attackers, responded accordingly. We won’t know exactly what happened – eyewitness accounts are wildly inconclusive  — but what if the dogs were the aggressors and the coyotes just defending themselves or their territory? Would we shoot the dogs?

But it’s easy to make some sort of distinction between wild animals and pets, even if domestic animals are just wild animals bred to be tame. (Consider, for instance, that if your housecat weighed 105 pounds, she might consider you a snack instead of a food provider and a lap to sit in.)

Our general fears in this regard are completely out of balance with reality. Domestic dogs are inherently more dangerous to humans than coyotes ever will be. Domestic dogs actually do kill people — and many dogs that kill were trained to do so by humans.

Only one or two human deaths in history have ever been attributed to a coyote. More than FOUR MILLION Americans are treated for domestic dog bites EACH YEAR, and 10-15 people annually are fatally attacked by domestic dogs.

But hey, it’s easier to blame the coyotes than change our behavior, right?

The view of the board at KGNU studios, Boulder, Colorado.

I host a program called “Roots & Branches” some Sunday mornings 9-11 a.m. on our local community radio station KGNU. The program is loosely based around American music, which I interpret as all recorded music in America that is blues, folk, country, gospel, soul, rock or bluegrass-based and whenever possible, played on acoustic instruments.

It’s a pretty big area from which to choose, but as one who is still amazed by the incredible depth and breadth of American music, it’s territory that I love exploring for program ideas.

This Sunday’s program was titled “History Lessons,” and it includes only songs that concern historical events or periods in U.S. history. After introducing the concept in the first set, the show follows a period the period from World War II to the fall of Saigon, with the songs interspersed with original audio clips of current events of the time.

As usual in this type of endeavor, I left off a batch of good songs that I forgot, couldn’t fit into the concept or the time frame. I received lots of good calls reminded me of songs I left off or forgot about, which means there is a chance I’ll get around to a Part Two sometime.

You can stream the program for a couple of weeks here.

“History Lessons” Set List

“Everett Ruess,” Dave Alvin, Ashgrove
“Sailing To Philadelphia,” Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia
“Galveston Flood,” Tom Rush, Take a Little Walk With Me
“When That Great Ship Went Down?”, William & Versey Smith, Anthology Of American Folk Music
“True Story Of Amelia Earhart,” Plainsong, In Search Of Amelia Earhart
“Franklin D. Roosevelt, Poor Man’s Friend,” Willie Eason, Sacred Steel
“New Orleans Wins The War,” Randy Newman, Land of Dreams
“Eisenhower Blues,” J.B. Lenoir, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues
“The Great Atomic Power,” The Louvin Brothers, Hillbilly Music…Thank God!
“The Merry Minuet,” Kingston Trio, The Kingston Trio at the Hungry i
“On Beatniks,” Carl Sandburg, The Beat Generation
“Little Boxes,” Malvina Reynolds, Washington Square Memoirs: Urban Folk (1950-1970)
“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased
“I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Phil Ochs, Washington Square Memoirs : The Great Urban Folk Boom 1950-1970
“Fortunate Son,” Todd Snider, Long May You Run : 15 Tracks In The Key Of Neil
“Tears Of Rage,” The Band, Music From Big Pink
“Vietnam Blues,” Cassandra Wilson, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Best Of The Blues
“Okie from Muskogee,”  Merle Haggard, Vintage Collections Series
“What Is Truth,” Johnny Cash, The Legend
“Armstrong,” 2:40, John Stewart, American Originals
“Find The Cost Of Freedom,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Single
“Galveston,” Jimmy Webb, Ten Easy Pieces
“Lord God Bird,” Sufjan Stevens, Single
“Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” Plainsong, In Search Of Amelia Earhart
“Sail Away,” Randy Newman, Sail Away
“Talking Green Beret New Super Yellow Hydraulic Banana Teeny Bopper Blues,” Jaime Brockett, Remember The Wind And The Rain
“An Account Of Haley’s Comet,” John Stewart, Sunstorm

Everett Ruess's remains might have been identified, but he's still on Twitter.

So I’m sitting at my computer yesterday and I get an email. It’s from Everett Ruess. He’s on Twitter, and he announces that he’s following me. So I checked his profile, determined he wasn’t a threat or a security risk, and now I’m following him.

Ruess, of course, is the wanderer who disappeared into the Utah badlands in 1934, became a Western environmental icon and whose remains were recently identified and now reside no more than a half mile from my house on the CU campus. Twitter is the popular mobile internet messaging service that allows you to say anything you want as long as it’s less than 140 characters. (Which, if you’re wondering, is exactly the length of that last sentence.)

Wonders never cease. We spend two vacations chasing Ruess around Utah’s hinterlands, and now I’m following him down here on my computer. So far he just quotes (pithily) from his own works, but I’m hoping he’ll start answering some of the many questions left by the discovery of his remains. I won’t hold my breath.

Perhaps this is part of a new social networking trend. Doing some research for “Roots and Branches,” the Americana radio show I host on KGNU, I found that Gene Autry has a MySpace page, where he lives on even though the Singing Cowboy died ten years ago. With the right social networks, you no longer have to die – you can live on in MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe someone will develop a special app for that.

If you don’t know about Ruess’s disappearance and discovery 75 years later, it is a compelling story. National Geographic Adventure takes far too much credit (one headline reads “After 75 years, National Geographic Adventure solves mystery of lost explorer), which is really stretching it, since the story belongs to a Navajo family who tried to tell people the real story to no avail.

But the magazine’s coverage is excellent, with a short video of the pre-excavation, a photo gallery documenting the site and cache and Dale Roberts’ story about the discovery.

For some journalistic balance, however, The Navajo Times puts the tale of the discovery into its proper context without the Geo hype.

And my own personal feelings about the discovery and its connection to one of my favorite Dave Alvin songs.

Gene Autry is still singing about cowboys and riding Champion on his MySpace page.

Sam Zell answered questions from students and the public at CU Law School this afternoon.

It was close and registration was free, so I went over to CU, where Sam Zell, serial entrepreneur, infamous dealmaker, owner of the private investment firm Equity Group Investments and, according to Forbes, the 68th richest American, was speaking today at noon at the Wolf Law Building.

As advertised, Zell, a gregarious man with a big smile, pulled no punches whether talking about the characteristics of a good entrepreneur, the economy and our current administration’s efforts to control it or the state of the journalism industry, all things he spent time expounding upon during his one hour and eight minute interview session conducted through the Colorado Law School.

Zell began in the real estate industry, but among other things, he created Jacor, a radio broadcast company with many stations, which he sold for a hefty profit to Clear Channel Communications in 1999. His Equity Group is the largest owner of apartment buildings in the United States, and as Prof. Scott Peppet pointed out in his introduction, he sold his Equity Office Properties Trust for $39 billion last year on the day before the stock market started going down.

He had taught a class earlier in the morning, and he reiterated what he told students then: the three years he spent in law school were the most incredibly boring three years of his life, but law school taught him to think, to learn how to ask questions, skills he says he uses every day of his life, something a room full of law students certainly wants to hear.

When asked what makes a good entrepreneur, he said that failure cannot be part of your vocabulary. He said self-confidence (“whether justified or not”) was important, but even more significant was to be able to identify problems and come up with a solution. The two most underrated traits of entrepreneurs, he explained, are the ability to execute, whether by yourself or by delegating to someone who can, and building relationships with the people with whom you work.

Zell said he thinks the economy is “flattening — that’s different than recovering,” he added. He called Barack Obama “a president in training” and unsuitable for the job. And he targeted Senator Barney Frank, who he said pressed Fannie Mae to ease credit requirements in 2000, as the trigger to the current crisis. He also denounced the speed with which Congress was working to make changes, arguing that there will be many unintended consequences. “We need a period of relaxation,” he said.

Of course the subject came around to his ownership of the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs and which, given the amount of debt he took on to buy Tribune, has been criticized as Zell’s worst decision.

Zell doesn’t see it that way and took particular pleasure skewering journalism and newspapers. “People are just finding out how profitable newspapers were,” reminding everyone that until recently it wasn’t unheard of for newspapers, which had a monopoly on information at the time, to show profits of 30-40 percent.

Today, he says, you can get the same information from other places, and besides, newspapers, still thinking as a monopoly, have become incompetent and arrogant. “It’s a business that has made little progress,” he said, “and is using metrics that are no longer relevant.” One of those is home delivery. There is still a market for home delivery, he said, but not according to the current structure. Selling a newspaper at a machine for 75 cents but delivering the same product to your doorstep for half that price is insane, and a business model that will have to change in the future.

He questioned the future of newspapers sharing content with the Associated Press because, he says, AP, which today sells that same content to Yahoo and other search engines, is actually a competitor. When asked what newspapers should focus on, he said a couple of times, “local, local, local. I’m not going to the Chicago Tribune for news about Afghanistan. But for news about the Cubs, I would.” He said that, despite journalist’s objections, shorter stories were better because newspapers’ own research indicated people didn’t like longer stories and wouldn’t read them.

He got some good laughs out of a story he told about his plan to put ads on the front page of The Los Angeles Times. “I thought that God was going to strike me dead,” he said of the response from journalists, “and the building would fall down around us,” he said to applause and laughter. “But we did it, and we’re still putting papers out every day, as far as I know.”

When asked if newspapers should be charging for content, he said that could be a model, but not until newspapers decide what they want to provide that nobody else can. “Newspapers need to understand who their customers are and appeal to their customers.”