 Uphill Battles
With hiking season finally upon us (at least most of us), I thought I’d take a slightly different tact from my usual convoluted verbal meanderings and actually talk about something borderline practical in this month’s Smoke Signals — that being the process of making one’s way uphill. (Forgive me this stylistic transgression; I promise to return to my usual convoluted verbal meanderings next month.)
 Up in Smoke
The first time I met James Tyler — J.T. to most of us — I was living in a trailer court in Silverthorne, Colo. I had just transplanted to Summit County to help start the Summit Daily News. Though my wife had not yet made the move, I did find myself with a semi/sorta roommate: Curtis Robinson, the first editor of the Summit Daily, who had talked me into becoming (not for the first time) his cohort in journalistic crime.
 Listing Who We Are
A couple months ago, Brendan Leonard, who writes the Gazette’s monthly Mountain Media column, stopped by the Casa de Fayhee in the midst of a two-month, 3,100-mile bicycle journey from San Diego to Florida. Accompanying him was Dr. Tony, a Chicago chiropractor Brendan has known since high school. Though I have never personally been attracted to the notion of long-distance bicycle touring (I tried it once, in the late- ’70s, and noticed that my ass did not stop hurting the entire trip), I was still certainly envious of these two young men who were at that time about two weeks into the type of adventure that will undoubtedly make its way onto their life-list resume, the type of experience that will provide hard-totrump story-telling fodder literally for the rest of their lives (though I don’t believe it will be the last arduous foray these young gents undertake) (at least I hope not).
 Evasive Action
During the last few weeks of December and the first few weeks in January, there was a back-andforth series of letters to the editor in a certain Colorado mountain newspaper dealing with the driving habits of tourists. It might seem, in a world where is found war, famine, pestilence, plague, social and environmental degradation of every sort and NFL playoffs sans Denver Broncos, that the subject of how tourists drive would not rank very high. But when you dwell in an area that 1) is heavily populated by altitude-affected visitors unused to mountain roads and 2) pretty much blanketed by snow, ice and slush for seven months a year, the subject of tourist driving pretty much trumps plague and pestilence.
 The Rock, the Edge and Atom Heart Mother
When I opted to move a significant percentage of my life back down to southwest New Mexico a couple years back, many of my High Country partners-in-crime assumed there was some degree of mid-life-crisis, seeking-out-the-old-self action going handin- hand with my quest to rest my weary and increasingly aged and infirmed bones in the bosom of warmer, less-altitudinous climes. After all, the town I moved to is the very hamlet where I loosely attended college, and it is common among those who know middle-aged men to warn them against reconnecting with anything college- related during that part of life when near-bouts all other lifestyle questions are funneled down to one Big One: “Just who is that broken-down old fart staring back at me from the mirror?”
 Mountainspeak
Due to the almost stunning volume of Letters to the Editor we receive, we are perpetually unable to do anything save fall further and further behind every issue printing communiqués from our readers. Therefore, I have opted to fill this month’s Smoke Signals page with Smoke Signals-based Letters. That, and, well, I’m in the process of recovering from shoulder surgery and an over-enthusiastic ingestion of a fun little drug called Vicodin has made it so everything I wrote with the full intention of filling this page with original material came out sounding like something from the “I Am The Walrus” school of literary clarity.
 Tracks in the snow
It is impossible to say for how many miles I had been following the tracks in the snow. When I hike, which I do almost every day, I rarely observe my surroundings. Almost all of my sightseeing on the trail occurs internally; I daydream, ruminate and ponder the greater cosmos, often without even noticing the terrain through which I pass. (This is one of the many, many reasons why I could never be a Hannah Hinchman-esque “naturalist/writer,” unless I somehow figured a way to mate naturalist writing with pure, unadulterated hallucinogenic fiction bullshit.)
 The Dark Side Lightened Up
It was not the best of circumstances
to be sitting there in the Summit
County Justice Center in Breckenridge
hung over for several reasons, not the
least of which being that my lawyer had been
adamant: “Whatever you do, DO NOT show
up for your alcohol evaluation either drunk
or hung over. They will know. That knowledge
will negatively affect their evaluation.
A negative evaluation might result in even
more jail time.” (Live and learn.) (Or not.)
The reason I was sitting in the Justice Center
was that, a few weeks prior, I had suffered
through the inevitable indignity of going
through what many consider a High Country
right-of-passage: I had earned myself a DUI.
 Carpe Manaña
A couple years ago, an acquaintance
left her newspaper gig in a
small New Mexico town that can
aptly be described as “constantly in
borderline disarray” and took a similar gig in
the heart of Colorado ski-resort craziness.
Several months after her move, I called and
asked how things were going. “It’s amazing,”
she breathlessly effused. “Up here, shit actually
gets done! There is no oppressive mañana
consciousness to kill people’s initiative.”
 Say What, Dude?
So, there I was, enjoying a frothy beverage in an altitudinous brewpub, not really meaning to eavesdrop on the conversation three barstools down, but the two burly gents — both of whom were still attired in their tastefully mud-and-bloodsplattered skin-tight mountain-biking ensembles — were talking so ebulliently, I couldn’t help it.
“Dude, that was one righteous ride, except for that gnarly biff and all that quag and those death cookies.”
 Zeeks, Nedheads & Zuman Beings
Five winters ago, I conceived
and organized a community bonfire
in Frisco, Colorado, known as
“Spontaneous Combustion,” which,
I am happy to report, was enough of a resounding
success that the town government
has now taken it over and made it an annual
event. (I mean, beer and fire … how can you
go wrong?) As part of the planning process
for the first-ever Spontaneous Combustion,
I decided to pen a speech, the construction
of which took me a surprisingly long time
because of a mental tête-à-tête ...
 The Great Fourteener Debate
And, speaking of climbing . . . Colorado's mountain country is dominated literally, and increasingly figuratively, by all those lofty summits above 14,000 feet in elevation. The process of standing atop the Fourteeners has evolved in recent years to both a craze and a bonafide tangible outdoor- recreation industry sub-component. According to the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, more than 500,000 people a year attempt to climb the state's Fourteeners every year.
16.02 billion bottles of beer on the wall
And, speaking of rivers . . . when
word hit the national news in 2007
that 1.5 billion gallons of toxic water
were backed up in the Leadville
Mining and Drainage Tunnel (important
note: the problem has been dealt with ...
THIS IS NOT BREAKING NEWS!!!), there
was justifiable unease in the Cloud City.
After all, when anything starts getting measured
in the billions, people sit up and pay
attention, be it oxygen molecules, grains
of rice, federal bailout dollars or gallons of
funky water pooling in a crumbling mine
tunnel above the town wherein dwell you
and yours.
 On the Run
When Royal “Scoop” Daniel III suddenly and inexplicably went missing from his Breckenridge law office two years ago, local enforcement personnel feared the worst. After initially exploring every variation on the foulplay theme imaginable, Breck’s finest finally learned that Mr. Daniel might not have met a bad end after all; rather, they learned, that he might have fled the country because of some alleged nefarious fiscal transactions.
 O.J. Goes Down the River
Over the course of three years, O.J. Simpson took
at least a half-dozen vacation trips to altitudinous
Summit County, Colorado, where I lived
for almost 20 years and where the Mountain
Gazette was reborn. The weird(est) part of the whole Simpson-visits-
Summit-County saga (at least to me) was that people
— locals and visitors alike — lined up to have their pictures
taken with The Juice, and word had it that when he
ventured into Downstairs at Eric’s in Breckenridge or
Farley’s in Frisco — two of his favorite imbiberies (and,
coincidentally, two of my favorites also, though I have
never run into Simpson) — he rarely had to pay for his
own drinks.
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