Category — Living in Boulder Co

This year we were joined by Lenny Bruce, Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Dennis Hopper.

I took the bus over to 4/20, the Smokeout that has taken place at 4:20 p.m. on April 20 at least back into the 1980s on the Quad of the University of Colorado. Waiting at the bus stop on Table Mesa, I watched groups of kids mostly, with surfboards and phones, walking toward the campus, talking and texting. At every stop, more people piled on, more than I’ve ever seen on a Dash, almost all of whom got off at Euclid south of the Quad. Four other people on the bus were writing; I was the only one with paper, which at least I found amusing.

A group of people made their way through the crowd with signs that suggested burning weed instead of oil.

I met Gil at the Pleasant Street stop a little after four, and we joined the throngs walking into the Quad, which was already jammed with smokers, hangers-on and the curious by the time we got there, just like the other time I attended two years ago. Airplanes dove in close, one with advertising trailing behind it, others, no doubt, filming. Police stood around looking bored, although there were, according to the paper, 11 people arrested for possession, a minor offense in Boulder.

A string band played quietly near the south steps of Old Main, where a photographer was stationed on the roof. Since cell-phone times are a bit off, there was a solid cheer and the smoke became thicker at 4:19, at 4:20 and 4:21. This one has become more of a media event than anything else. I found myself taking pictures of other people taking pictures of what was going on.

This magic moment: Balloons bounced and flags flew through the thickening smoke as the time grew closer to 4:20.

The papers said there were 10,000 people there, but the number could just as easily have been 15,000, many no doubt lured by the publicity generated by local media and a chance to get a buzz with strangers.

That was about it, and we were back in Gil’s office by 4:35.

A string band played quietly over by Old Main.

For all the media attention given it — Playboy magazine (it still exists?) declared CU the top party school in the country mostly because of this three-minute event, TV stations hype it because they have video from last year, and the local paper, the Camera, has been hyping this for days  — this is a real snoozer of a happening.

It was ten years ago, on March 24, 2001, that Sweet Lunacy: A Brief History of Boulder Rock, was first screened at the Boulder Theatre, the opening act for the 25th reunion concert of Dusty Drapes and the Dusters.

Don Chapman and I had worked on and off for more than two years on the documentary, commissioned and funded by a grant from the Boulder Arts Commission for Boulder Municipal Channel Eight. We filmed a host of people who had been part of the music scene in Boulder from the 1950s, when Ray Imel Sr. and Rex Barker opened Tulagi, through the Astronauts, Flash Cadillac, the Dusters, Michael Woody and the Too High Band, Judy Roderick, Zephyr, Firefall, Big Head Todd and the Monsters and many others  into the 1980s, when the Fox Theatre began hosting live shows, and boiled down more than 30 hours of interviews into a one-hour documentary.

Don put the finishing touches on it that morning, and standing there watching it amongst my friends and more than a thousand people for whom it was made was one of the great hours of my life. It has been showing regularly since its release on Channel Eight.

But for ten years, that’s the only way people could see it. Because of budget and staff cuts, Channel Eight no longer makes copies of the film available. At present, it is only available if you have access to Channel 8, and it is not on a regular schedule, so it is truly accessible to only a scant few people.

Meanwhile, requests for it have remained pretty steady over the years. It was originally made for VHS (remember that?), and in a digital world many people who only have it in that format might no longer be able to access it. Others who were interviewed or played a part in the film have never seen it. I get emails inquiring about it, but beyond burning and sending a physical copy, there is no legitimate way for people outside of Boulder to see it.

The arts commission’s only charge to Don and me was to get it in front of as many people as possible, and the way to do that today is to make it available on YouTube. It needs at least the chance to go viral.

It’s now at sweetlunacyboulder, chopped into four easily digestible 15-minute segments, thanks to the lovely and talented Lauren Winton. I have added some notes so you know what’s in each segment, and I’m sure I’ll be playing with annotation and other stuff to make it more easily understood. More about Sweet Lunacy and its making here.

If you are interested in screening the film, please contact me at leland.rucker@gmail.com. But most of all, please, enjoy.

The fire earlier this afternoon.

Another dangerous fire, as always whipped by shifting, gusty winds, has closed all the roads into the foothills west of Boulder.

I got a few photos from south Boulder this afternoon, this one from the trail around the CU property off Table Mesa. Although the TV stations have been following the story all day, we really don’t know much. It’s burning up there west of Lee Hill Road and east of Four Mile Canyon Road, which is where it apparently started about 10 a.m. this morning. There are hundreds of homes up there, and reports are now saying that dozens of structures have burned. Thankfully there are, so far, no casualties or injuries. But firefighters have no control at this point.

I first saw the cloud about 11:45 a.m. I had been having coffee with a friend, and there was no sign of anything at 11:30. Fifteen minutes later, the huge cloud looked almost apocalyptic to the west and north.

The winds have calmed, and it’s cooling off now, and I’ve been listening to the police radio on a website. Evacuations are taking place on Lee Hill and Olde Stage Road, although many people on both of those roads refusing to leave. The Olde Stage Fire wasn’t that long ago.

It’s dark now, and the slurry bombers have stopped running. We drove out to the reservoir on Cherryvale Road just a few minutes ago. The western hills looked a scene from Mordor in the Ring Trilogy. Several fires could be see from near the mouth of Boulder Canyon all the way north to Lee Hill Road, and flames occasionally flared. The photos of burning houses are already filling the news websites. The smell of smoke permeates the air.

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?