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DENVER — The New Yorker in a recent article examined the politics of Colorado. The article argued that if Barack Obama hopes to wind the West, he needs to understand how Democrats came to control Colorado. The ski towns were mentioned as what political operatives called a “blue strip.”
For most of the last 60 years, Republicans have controlled the Rocky Mountain West. They still do in those areas where ranching prevails.
But in 2004, a noteworthy trend became evident in Colorado — and, for that matter, in other parts of the recreation-dominated West. Places like Gunnison, Grand and Routt counties —homes respectively to Crested Butte, Winter Park and Steamboat Springs — bucked their Republican traditions and voted for a Democrat, John Kerry, for president.
Some ski-anchored mountain counties — notably Aspen-dominated Pitkin County and Telluride-dominated San Miguel County — have consistently voted for Democrats for decades.
But this new “blue strip” of resort communities in formerly rural, traditional Republican ranch countries is “now full of second homes and growing,” observed Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s chief of staff, Jim Carpenter.
Carpenter has observed that change closely, as he grew up in Granby, located near Winter Park in Grand County. For decades, it was so Republican than the only local elections that mattered occurred in the primary. Everybody from county coroner to surveyer was registered a Republican, whatever his or her true leanings may have been. In 2004, however, Grand County crossed the aisle to Kerry. This resort blue-strip, however, alone does not explain why Colorado became a swing state. Also important, noted the New Yorker, were the growing number of Hispanics and, most important of all, the shift in Denver’s suburbs.
“Democrats often pay homage to the symbols of the American frontier,” concluded the magazine. “But the iconography of their Western strategy is not so much about mountain, cowboys, and tumbleweed as it is about tract houses, research labs, and wind farms.”
Drama continues about Jumbo Glacier Resort
INVERMERE, B.C. — The future of the proposed Jumbo Glacier Resort is knotted.
The ski area and potentially 6,400-bed resort has been pushed forward by the provincial government, but stubbornly resisted by two organizations, Wildsight and the Jumbo Creek Conservation Society. A disputed plebiscite conducted last year in the Invermere area found 80 percent of voters opposed the development.
The latest twist is a procedural one. The provincial government agreed to transfer the right to operate a ski-training facility on Farnham Glacier. The new company, Glacier Resorts, was building an 800-meter road to the glacier and planned to install a portable platter lift.
Wildsight, one of the environmental groups, riled the public into creating a blockade. The government is not challenging that blockade, reports Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine.
A more local newspaper, the Invermere Valley Echo, says that two First Nations groups are tilting in opposite directions on Jumbo Creek. Ktunaxa Nation has joined the blockade — although it is also negotiating with the resort proponents. Another First Nations people, the Shuswap Indian Band, had previously gone on record supporting the project. The Shuswaps insist that the development is within their traditional territory.
Unambiguous Keystone trumps Purgatory Drive
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — It turns out that people won’t have to live in Purgatory, just as nobody officially skis there, either.
That had been the plan in Cheyenne, where the name “Purgatory Drive” had been picked in a subdivision with a street grid whose names came from ski resorts.
The ski area in question is the original name for the Durango Mountain Resort. The name came from Spanish explorers, who lost a member of their party to the waters of a river that they called El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, or the “The River of Lost Souls in Purgatory.”
Today, it’s better known as just the Animas River, although another river of lost souls elsewhere in Colorado is called the Purgatory.
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle says the developers of Fox Run, a subdivision of rural acreages, were thinking of a scenic ski area when they chose the name Purgatory, but later decided that some prospective homeowners might instead think of a morally complex and ambiguous afterlife.
The streets signs are being changed out with the more prosaic “Keystone Drive.”
Spencer joins Sultan and Grand Turk in San Juans
SILVERTON — Two mountains west of Silverton have memorable names: Grand Turk and Sultan. A mountain newly named, Spencer, has a more prosaic name, but the individual for whom it was named, Donald C. Spencer, was anything but.
The Durango Telegraph explains that the namesake developed an entire new field called Spencer cohomology, which combines algebra, calculus and geometry.
Perhaps more saliently, while teaching at Princeton University in the 1950s, he was mentor to John Nash, the mathematician made famous by the book, “A Beautiful Mind,” and later a movie of the same name. The author, Sylvia Nasar, called Spencer a “brilliant theorist, teacher and mentor, and later, a bearded environmental.”
Retiring to Durango in 1977, Spencer was bitterly opposed to a dam on the Animas River, among other issues. He particularly loved the montane and alpine environments around Silverton.
For most of the last 60 years, Republicans have controlled the Rocky Mountain West. They still do in those areas where ranching prevails.
But in 2004, a noteworthy trend became evident in Colorado — and, for that matter, in other parts of the recreation-dominated West. Places like Gunnison, Grand and Routt counties —homes respectively to Crested Butte, Winter Park and Steamboat Springs — bucked their Republican traditions and voted for a Democrat, John Kerry, for president.
Some ski-anchored mountain counties — notably Aspen-dominated Pitkin County and Telluride-dominated San Miguel County — have consistently voted for Democrats for decades.
But this new “blue strip” of resort communities in formerly rural, traditional Republican ranch countries is “now full of second homes and growing,” observed Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s chief of staff, Jim Carpenter.
Carpenter has observed that change closely, as he grew up in Granby, located near Winter Park in Grand County. For decades, it was so Republican than the only local elections that mattered occurred in the primary. Everybody from county coroner to surveyer was registered a Republican, whatever his or her true leanings may have been. In 2004, however, Grand County crossed the aisle to Kerry. This resort blue-strip, however, alone does not explain why Colorado became a swing state. Also important, noted the New Yorker, were the growing number of Hispanics and, most important of all, the shift in Denver’s suburbs.
“Democrats often pay homage to the symbols of the American frontier,” concluded the magazine. “But the iconography of their Western strategy is not so much about mountain, cowboys, and tumbleweed as it is about tract houses, research labs, and wind farms.”
Drama continues about Jumbo Glacier Resort
INVERMERE, B.C. — The future of the proposed Jumbo Glacier Resort is knotted.
The ski area and potentially 6,400-bed resort has been pushed forward by the provincial government, but stubbornly resisted by two organizations, Wildsight and the Jumbo Creek Conservation Society. A disputed plebiscite conducted last year in the Invermere area found 80 percent of voters opposed the development.
The latest twist is a procedural one. The provincial government agreed to transfer the right to operate a ski-training facility on Farnham Glacier. The new company, Glacier Resorts, was building an 800-meter road to the glacier and planned to install a portable platter lift.
Wildsight, one of the environmental groups, riled the public into creating a blockade. The government is not challenging that blockade, reports Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine.
A more local newspaper, the Invermere Valley Echo, says that two First Nations groups are tilting in opposite directions on Jumbo Creek. Ktunaxa Nation has joined the blockade — although it is also negotiating with the resort proponents. Another First Nations people, the Shuswap Indian Band, had previously gone on record supporting the project. The Shuswaps insist that the development is within their traditional territory.
Unambiguous Keystone trumps Purgatory Drive
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — It turns out that people won’t have to live in Purgatory, just as nobody officially skis there, either.
That had been the plan in Cheyenne, where the name “Purgatory Drive” had been picked in a subdivision with a street grid whose names came from ski resorts.
The ski area in question is the original name for the Durango Mountain Resort. The name came from Spanish explorers, who lost a member of their party to the waters of a river that they called El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, or the “The River of Lost Souls in Purgatory.”
Today, it’s better known as just the Animas River, although another river of lost souls elsewhere in Colorado is called the Purgatory.
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle says the developers of Fox Run, a subdivision of rural acreages, were thinking of a scenic ski area when they chose the name Purgatory, but later decided that some prospective homeowners might instead think of a morally complex and ambiguous afterlife.
The streets signs are being changed out with the more prosaic “Keystone Drive.”
Spencer joins Sultan and Grand Turk in San Juans
SILVERTON — Two mountains west of Silverton have memorable names: Grand Turk and Sultan. A mountain newly named, Spencer, has a more prosaic name, but the individual for whom it was named, Donald C. Spencer, was anything but.
The Durango Telegraph explains that the namesake developed an entire new field called Spencer cohomology, which combines algebra, calculus and geometry.
Perhaps more saliently, while teaching at Princeton University in the 1950s, he was mentor to John Nash, the mathematician made famous by the book, “A Beautiful Mind,” and later a movie of the same name. The author, Sylvia Nasar, called Spencer a “brilliant theorist, teacher and mentor, and later, a bearded environmental.”
Retiring to Durango in 1977, Spencer was bitterly opposed to a dam on the Animas River, among other issues. He particularly loved the montane and alpine environments around Silverton.
