Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that can almost smell the barbecue in the air … the wafting smoke, the searing flesh, the funnel cakes that have nothing to do with barbecue but are somehow part of the scene regardless.

Yep, the Frisco BBQ Challenge starts Friday night with a band we’ve never heard of but which, we’re sure, is fantabulous. The actual barbecue stuff won’t show up until Saturday, and by then we’ll be salivating like Pavlovs’ dogs to get us some-a dat stuff!

For all you militant vegans out there – some of whom have written us vitriolic letters portending doom over the overt consumption of meat – all’s we can say is perhaps it’s best if you steered clear of Frisco Main Street for a day or two. In fact, it might be better if you left the county altogether just for this weekend. All the rhetoric in the world isn’t going to stop the BBQ train, but the fact remains that, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to go.

Speaking of Frisco, we always like this time of year because they pretty-up the streets just before the BBQ fest – which means painting all the stripes that got sorta washed away during the winter. And that means that all our excuses for awful parking jobs are now gone, so we’ll have to pay a little more attention. Remember: If you’ve got local plates, you have to drive and park like a saint, because all those out-of-county folks won’t be. They will drive .02 mph in a 20 mph zone; they will stop in the middle of the Dam Road to take pictures; they will suddenly accelerate and blast through that yellow light and leave you fuming at the red; they will make sudden, jerky turns and pretend not to notice the 17-car pileup behind them. In short, they will do everything in their power to drive us friggin’ insane – but we must not let them! Be kind, offer directions when you can and just think of those days in May when you could shoot a cannon off down Main Street and nobody’d notice.

But here’s a suggestion for rental car companies: Paint the driver’s cellphone numbers in big numbers on the front and side of the cars, that way when they’re spazzing out we can call them and tell them where the Walmart is or which way’s Breck or whatever. In fact, we think they should stop every non-local car at the tunnel and paint the numbers on there – and the folks can be all prepped to get all kindza loving advice from us helpful locals.

Just a thought. We love our tourists, don’t get us wrong. We just wish we could help them a little easier to, y’know, move them along a bit and help them get to where they’re a-goin’. Somehow, all the GPS technology in the world hasn’t caught up to this problem yet.

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So no Fourth o’ July fireworks in Breck this year, on account-a the drought. We remember back in the day, Frisco was the only game in town anyway, so it’ll be like then, we reckon. We should also remind everyone that fireworks are big no-nos this year – even more so than usual. It’s tinder-box dry out there and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. When it does, though, we hope the rain gods have the courtesy to at least wait until, say, a Tuesday evening, when it can rain like mad from, say, 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. so’s not to disturb us in any way.

Is that too much to ask? If it’s going to be all drought-y, then at least when it finally does rain, it should be convenient for us all.

We out.