Letter of the Month

Life-changing experience

M. John: I am sending this letter in response to your recent Smoke Signals column, “Tracks in the Snow.”

A few days after the “Tracks in the Snow” column appeared, I was getting ready to take my seven-year-old Husky hybrid for her first walk of the day. The sun had finally cleared the San Juan Mountains just enough to see the frost on the ground outside my Bayfield home. “Shayna, come on girl, time to go out.” She stood transfixed, peering at something outside the window, not a sound coming from her, just a silent stare.

Following her gaze, I saw, not more than 20 yards off my deck, a full-grown, male mountain lion! It might have been 150 pounds and seven feet tip to tail, about twice the size of Shayna. “Holy shit! Whoa, girl, we ain’t goin’ anywhere,” I said.

The two of us stood at the window watching it prowl across the back yard, slow and easy like, not a care in the world. Of course, my camera was in the car, about one easy lunge away from Leo. Frustrated but awestruck, I watched the big cat saunter toward the woods and disappear.

My call to the Colorado Division of Wildlife brought an agent within 10 minutes. Agent Dorsey, from the Department of Natural Resources, stepped out of her pickup truck, listened to my description and determined it must have been looking for a female to mate with. After I joked that it might have better luck west of here at the Billy Goat Saloon in Grandview, Agent Dorsey picked up a branch and proceeded to walk the land in pursuit. A branch! No weapon? Not even pepper spray? Okay then ... she skirted the area for about 15 minutes and returned to let me know she had spotted some ground marking a hundred yards out, but thought the lion was probably gone. “The males can have a range of about 75 miles,” she said.

Later in the day, she returned with warning signs to post and gave me some 12-gauge rubber pellet shotgun shells, in case the kitty returned. “Just aim for its hind quarters,” she told me. “It won’t penetrate. You just want to scare it off so it won’t come back. And don’t hit it in the face or eyes. We don’t need a wounded lion.”

Then, before climbing back into the truck, she left me with a powerful statement: “Most people who see them change forever.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that until I walked Shayna later on. The thought of encountering it was scary, but I wanted to see it again because it was so awesome and for days afterward, I kept a vigil hoping to spot him. Dorsey was right; I will never be the same.

Thanks, John. Love your stuff since I lived in Blue River.

Stew Mosberg,
Bayfield, Colo.

Species adaptation

M. John: Re: Your Smoke Signals MG #159 (Carpe Mañana). I live in Mexico six months of every winter, and found humor and wisdom (did you know you were capable of espousing wisdom?) in that piece. I see many “Type-As” attempting to live in old Mexico without changing their ways. They arrive saying they love the mañana lifestyle, but before long they are bitching because their pool man arrived late, or the new dishwasher was not delivered on the promised day. It can be really entertaining (in a sad way of course) to watch these people go ballistic with their exploding temple veins. They either adapt to mañana, or return to being the controlling assholes they were in their fast-paced, impatient, money-grubbing USA world.

Relating to the wisdom part of your piece, the best sentence was, “It translates to a recognition that some things are worth getting wound up about, while the overwhelming majority of things are not.”

I have been collecting “sentences of wisdom” for numerous years, and added that one to my list (with appropriate credit, of course.)

Best regards,
Eric McCracken

High and dry

MG: Your booze-centric issue’s (#160) celebration of inebriate culture as found in mountain bars both contemporary and in the days of yore struck me as to how vacuous and limited discretionary time is spent by many of those treading water in the netherworld of mountain resort towns and their worker bee satellites. One wonders what many fleece-clad folks would do without their alcohol-fueled fog and its residual fake bon amitie and inertia.

Far from the “funky wild gloriousness” of such environs, a lifestyle so steeped in getting pickled regularly would, I think, seem comical to most onlookers if it wasn’t such a waste.

Sincerely,

Stephen Brockmeyer,
Pleasant View, Colo.

More ‘Tracks in the Snow’

Fayhee: I greatly enjoyed your “Tracks in the Snow” (MG # 161). Seeing wildlife in the wild is truly one of the best things about living here in the “New West.” As a resident of Fourmile Canyon, 13 miles west of the People’s Republic of Boulder, I have had the distinct privilege of viewing wildlife from up close and afar many times over the years. I have had no less than 20 mountain lion sightings, including several at close range, too many bear sightings to count, not to mention the foxes, coyotes, bobcats and even one moose that we have had in the neighborhood over the years. My favorite is the annual return of a pregnant mother fox, who for the past three years, has had her cubs in a drainage pipe on the side of our road. It’s amazing to see the cubs grow up and play together and then to see them leave their mom and make it on their own in the canyon. Most of our neighbors share an appreciation for wildlife and feel that we live on their turf and therefore accept the consequences of living around wildlife, including, but not limited to, losing pets. There are a select few idiots, and many, many more down in Boulder, who feel wildlife is a nuisance and should be removed, killed or relocated. I find most of these people have lost a pet (typically the family dog) in a situation that is their fault (typically left out in a yard with a low fence or left out to roam). I must mention here that I own two dogs and am a responsible pet owner who doesn’t leave my dog outside and keeps my dogs on leash when I am out with them.

One alarmist neighbor of ours put letters in all the mailboxes in our canyon warning people that 36 pets had been lost in the past two years (including his own, left in, yup, you guessed it, a low-fencedin yard) AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!! He gave his phone number and said he was soliciting opinions on what to do about the “wildlife problem” (good grief). I called him and asked him for his solution. His response was that the wildlife department needed to come up in trucks with fireworks and scare off the mountain lions (fire danger anyone?). I asked him where he thought the lions would go, he responded that, while he hadn’t given that much thought, he assumed they would “go to another canyon” — NIMBYism at its best. I wished him sarcastic luck on his new venture and plan to egg his house on Halloween each year.

My greatest fear is that eventually a kid is going to get killed by a lion in one of the western neighborhoods in Boulder and then the full witch hunt will be on. It will be like the prairie dog crisis all over again. God help us all. If you don’t like wildlife, move to New Jersey.

Sincerely,
Name withheld upon request

Bottoms up

M. John: As a former O’Bannon’s bartender, I read Jody Borzilleri’s piece in the October Mountain Gazette, #160, with great interest. It brought back a flood of memories and a smile to my face as I remembered some of my own experiences working this not-so-ordinary bar back in the early ’90s.

There was the time, for instance, when the bar patrons were bitching about there not being any bar snacks, so I put out a bowl of dry cat food, which was immediately sampled by most of the motley construction crew in front of me, some of whom continued to eat it after I informed them of what it was. As I am 5 foot 6 on a good day, and 135 pounds, this was a risky proposition. “It’s actually not too bad,” said one of the roofers, who was twice my size.

This was a job I was fired twice from (then rehired the following day), once for decorating the bar with raw chicken feet when I closed one night (the owner did not find it as funny in the morning as I did the night before). The other time was for stopping a drunken customer from pouring a shot for the owner at 2:05 a.m. from a bottle in his coat. Getting fired was a great favor to me, as I did not have to clean up the bar that night.

There was the woman daytime regular that would occasionally provide oral sex to men in the bar in exchange for drinks, propping them up on the women’s room sink, which the men would sometimes later need to come back and fix if it pulled away from the wall during the session.

We had a wall of photos posted behind the bar, including one taken of one of our woman bartenders asleep, sitting on the woman’s room toilet with her pants around her ankles. Every now and again I would receive phone calls from tourists wanting to make dinner reservations, which I would enthusiastically confirm, explaining that our cuisine was a fusion of Italian (frozen Tombstone pizzas) and Mexican (frozen gas-station-style burritos). Later in the night at the appointed time, a well-dressed couple from out of town, once wearing matching furs, would walk in the door and, with a confused look of disgust and wondering if they came to the right place, turn around and leave without a word. The most interesting tip I ever received was a handful of magic mushrooms, actually given to the female bartender I was working with that night, that we split up, half and half, like all our tips from the evening. I even invented a new shot in response to customers who would ask, “What do you have for free here?” I named the shot the “bloody eyeball,” as it consisted of a cocktail onion in a shot glass with bright red Firewater cinnamon schnapps poured over it. O’Bannon’s most successful advertising campaign consisted of an ad in the San Juan Horseshoe with the two owners, Harry Force and Ray Prince, shirts off. The headline read, “Telluride’s Only Topless Bar.” There was not enough whiskey in that bar to erase the image of these two 50-plus-year-old, hard-drinking men with their shirts off. But we all gave it a good try.

For this was a drinking man’s bar, at least during the day and early evening, before the restaurant workers came in after their shifts. This was a bar where there would be a line of people waiting outside for you to open at 10 a.m. on a sunny weekday. I pity the bartender that showed up late for the day shift and didn’t open on time; the laser-sharp looks of disdain from those waiting outside the door could burn a hole in your head. This was a meeting place for patrons nicknamed “Carparts” and “Treetop”, “Rooster” and “Pinto”, “Davey Crockett” and “Slow Terry”, men who wouldn’t tip a college boy who didn’t know what a real day’s work was, putting a roof on or framing a house. And they were right, I did not have any idea what it was like, half-crocked from a few morning or lunchtime beers, to get up on a ladder and work with my hands. But they grew to accept me, and their infrequent tips were as appreciated by me as my infrequent buying of a round was appreciated by them.

Glenn Steckler,
Telluride, Colo.

Using MG to meet mountain women

M. John: In reference to your Bar Issue letter exchange with Jen from Hoonah, Alaska (MG #160): Mountain town: Town whereby a resident can hike from his/her house to the top of a peak (at least 3000’elevation gain) and back in a day without having to sit in a steel wheelchair (car) for any part of the approach, ascent or descent.

I currently live in Durango, Colo. (not a mountain town), and I grew up in Juneau, Alaska, (mountain town) where the peaks line the deep water fjords like giant palaces in Venice. It takes a real scrap of a mountain person to wrestle with the alder, devil’s club, and other Gore-Tex/human-flesh-shredding brush that clings to the lower flanks of these stone sentinels.

If a climber/groveler/hardman/hardwoman manages to fumble beyond the mountainous pubic hair of mosquito-infested jungle, they are in store for a view that would make Rienhold Messner shit his pantaloons, unless it’s cloudy, which, as Jen from Hoonah pointed out, is most of the time. This is why it is so important to obtain a coveted job that allows an individual to leave the job-site when he/she chooses (whenever the sun is out), just like powder days.

Thanks MG, for writing about things that actually matter, like mountains, and girls who live in Hoonah.

P.S. Jen, how ’bout ditching yer buddies and tromping through some devil’s club with me?!

Nicholas Foster