Around the Mountains: Silverton still in the sticks

Town lacking good ramp onto Information Highway

SILVERTON — Silverton continues to feel aloof from the rest of Colorado and, for that matter, the world.

Alone among the 64 county seats in Colorado, it lacks fiber-optic cable that community leaders believe is essential to forward economic progress.

A state-wide program called the Beanpole Project, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Bill Owens in 2000, promised to deliver that connectivity.

But no other county in Colorado is as geographically isolated as San Juan. With a base elevation of 9,000 feet, it lacks even one tilled acre. The landscape is so rugged that for days at a time avalanches nearly every winter close the highway that normally connects Silverton to outside towns.

So it’s no mystery why Qwest, the telecommunications company that contracted with Colorado to deliver the fiber-optic network, has found Silverton to be a tough proposition. And furthermore, there aren’t a lot of people in Silverton in any season of the year, just 500 or so, and only a handful more in outlying areas of San Juan County.

Telluride, Ophir, Lake City and a dozen other geographically isolated towns (and county seats) have fiber optics. But the closest fiber optic to Silverton is still 16 miles away, near the ski area called Durango Mountain Resort (formerly Purgatory). Close, but no cigar, as the saying goes — and a violation of the agreement pledged by Colorado’s state government eight years ago, say community leaders.

At first, the town’s Internet connectivity was so bad that when the steam train arrived from Durango with tourists at mid-day, e-mail traffic sputtered and web-browsers could not download pages. Telephone lines that then handled credit-card charges as well as Internet traffic could not handle both.

Grizzlies fine with minus–40, but pine beetles unclear

BANFF, Alberta — The Arctic blast of mid-December set a new record of 40 below at Banff — and launched hope that a growing population of bark beetles was knocked back.

Pine beetles in Banff and the Bow River Valley are nowhere near the magnitude found in Colorado or in the northern interior forests of British Columbia. However, there are worries that it’s just a matter of time.

Brad Jones a forest-health officer with Sustainable Resource Development, found the cold spell “promising,” if still insufficiently severe to guarantee death to the beetles.

Normally, 24 hours of continuous 40-below temperatures are needed to wipe out the beetles. That’s because the beetles have something of a natural antifreeze that they develop as temperatures grow colder.

However, in this case, temperatures had been relatively warm beforehand. That means maybe the beetles weren’t yet acclimated to cold. Nobody will know until spring.

But the bitter cold wasn’t enough to drive one grizzly bear into hibernation. The bear was feasting on grains of corn that have fallen off passing trains near the town of Banff.

While this was a record cold temperature, the larger trend has been warm weather at both ends of winter, notes the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

Lake Louise considers a composting facility

LAKE LOUISE, Alberta — Lake Louise is considering a composting facility to process food waste from hotels.

Such a composting facility could eliminate half the waste stream to a landfill near Calgary, more than an hour to the east.

Jasper and Banff already have composting structures, notes the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

Crested Butte says old sheds must stay upright

CRESTED BUTTE — The home in which Elaine Weston lives was built in 1882, when Crested Butte was a supply town for silver and coal mines. She bought it in 1994, decades after the town had been reinvented as a ski town.

In the back of her house is a chicken coop, which is no longer used. But, according to a law passed by the Crested Butte Council, Weston will be responsible for making sure the chicken coop doesn’t fall over.

The same law applies to 200 outbuildings, which are among 420 structures in Crested Butte listed as contributing historic buildings.