Posts tagged Pikes Peak
Pikes Peak Ski Area is a Boulder Fraud case.
Nov 12th
John Ball is Boulder latest flim flam man since Jared Polis
The Resort at Pikes Peak was never going to open. According to the state of Colorado John C. Ball tried to sell securities illegally. They put a stop to him on the Pikes Peak Deal.
In his previous most recent deal gone bad, Ball also managed to skim all of the money out of Eller Industries, a Boulder based broadband company according to two of it’s main stock holders. That company was a pink sheet penny stock company which never produced anything, yet took investors for millions according to sources close to that company. Ball came in to help raise money for a second round, but sunk Eller further in debt. “He got paid, we lost everything” they said.
Pink Sheet stocks are notorious shells used to defraud investors. Companies like Eller were made famous in the movie Bolder room.
There are also questions about John Balls credentials not only as a businessman but as an engineer. Local media have covered this story with a lot of high hopes failing to see that the Pikes Peak Ski resort is just another stock scam.
There have been anonymous posts put up about Ball concerning another Ball company called Running Eagle. According to Scam Book Ball has taken loans out for this company and not repaid them.
Some Eller Industry Boulder stock holders who wished to remain anonymous told Boulder Channel 1 news on Friday that ” John Ball is a fake”. Much of Balls Linked in information could not be verified either.
Boulder Police, District attorney and Colorado Attorney General refused to comment on their investigations into John Ball fraud allegations, but one assistant AG did say “Our office gives theses kinds of cases the highest priority. It is the Lions share of our work. You would be amazed at the number of shady investment deals our office see.”
Actually, we wouldn’t. Boulder has been notorious for scams since Horace Greeley pitched a handful of bad investments concerning railroads in the 19th century. Boulder has seen its share of Gold and coal mine investments go bust too. We’ve had Oil well dusters for over 100 years. The Penny Stock scams of the 1980’s saw companies like NBI go bust. We had huge banking scandals in the 90s. The 2000’s saw Dot bomb busts such as Jared Polis billion dollar loser Blue Mountain Arts on line. It was sold to EXcite but 1000’s of small investors lost millions to Polis in the Excite stock deal. Polis walked away clean, even a hero, but Excite stock holders were ruined.
Some Boulder Billionaires scoff at Polis stock deals including Bob Greenlee former city council member and investor of numerous successful media ventures. Greenlee started the famous KBCO 97.3 in the 1980s. He sold it and then started other Radio stations, bought and sold media properties as well as restaurants and casinos. He has made a lot of people rich and has few losses in his portfolio. He happens to be a conservative Republican compared to Polis radical leftist leanings. Does this suggest that all leftists are crooks and republicans are ethical ?? Not by boulders standards. Leftists can do no wrong in Boulder. Alls fair in Startups and Stock scams There seems to be an ethics difference between those who run successful thriving companies Like Greenlee and Boulderites who create bad stock deals from the beginning.
Jo Pezzillo lost investors money in Go GaGa an ill conceived internet radio station. Pezzillo still prances around Boulder like a God, but he’s another guy with a losing track record with other peoples money. In his case he took some of Greenlees money as well as other VC money, but Go Ga Ga was a dud from the beginning. It is when the public is duped that scammy investments hurt most. Pezzillo still pushes himself in social media as a successful entrepreneur, but his records show a list of Start up failures including Metafly. Pezzillo represents hundreds of scammers who hustle money in Boulders coffee shops
VC’s can weather losses. But not everyone with money should be a VC. Current Start Ups pushed by Tech Stars have had their share of dry holes too. It is always the investors, the little guy, the husband and wife who put their hard earned money in these companies with hope of riches only to lose it that makes us wonder about Boulders start up craze.. Right now Brad Feld and David Cohen are Boulder darlings in the tech startup world. They are worth millions, but their high risk startups are funded by investors. Investors that Feld and Cohen have groomed into becoming Venture Capitalists. It is all a bit quirky. Will Tech Stars blow up too leaving investors burned?? The odds are in that favor.But Boulder always loves a good financial scandal and we never learn from them.
Our advice is watch your wallet and open investment accounts only with the most conservative of houses. Most of Boulders rich use Well Fargo Brokerage at the main branch on the Pearl Street mall. They have been in business there since the gold rush days and they don’t make wild investments.
In the end John Ball is in good company here in Boulder. He is just less skilled at conning investors.
New CU-Boulder study clarifies diversity, distribution of cutthroat trout in Colorado
Sep 24th
Will the real greenback cutthroat trout please stand up?
A novel genetic study led by the University of Colorado Boulder has helped to clarify the native diversity and distribution of cutthroat trout in Colorado, including the past and present haunts of the federally endangered greenback cutthroat trout.
The study, led by CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Jessica Metcalf, was based largely on DNA samples taken from cutthroat trout specimens preserved in ethanol in several U.S. museums around the country that were collected from around the state as far back as 150 years ago. The new study, in which Metcalf and her colleagues extracted mitochondrial DNA from fish to sequence genes of the individual specimens and compared them with modern-day cutthroat trout strains, produced some startling results.
The biggest surprise, said Metcalf, was that the cutthroat trout native to the South Platte River drainage appears to survive today only in a single population outside of its native range — in a small stream known as Bear Creek that actually is in the nearby Arkansas River drainage. The strain from Bear Creek is thought to have been collected from the South Platte River drainage in the 1880s by an early hotelier who stocked the fish in a pond at the Bear Creek headwaters to help promote an early tourist route up Pikes Peak.
“We thought one way to get to the question of which cutthroat trout strains are native to particular drainages was to go back to historical samples and use their DNA as a baseline of information,” said Metcalf of the chemistry and biochemistry department and a former postdoctoral researcher at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. “Our study indicates the descendants of the fish that were stocked into Bear Creek in the late 1800s are the last remaining representatives of the federally protected greenback cutthroat trout.”
A second, key set of data was all of the Colorado cutthroat trout stocking records over the past 150 years, a task spearheaded by study co-author and fish biologist Chris Kennedy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Between 1889 and 1925, for example, the study showed that more than 50 million cutthroat trout from the Gunnison and Yampa river basins were stocked in tributaries of all major drainages in the state, jumbling the picture of native cutthroat strains in Colorado through time and space.
Originating from the Pacific Ocean, cutthroat trout are considered one of the most diverse fish species in North America and evolved into 14 recognized subspecies in western U.S. drainages over thousands of years. In Colorado, four lineages of cutthroats were previously identified: the greenback cutthroat, the Colorado River cutthroat, the Rio Grande cutthroat and the extinct yellowfin cutthroat.
The museum specimens used in the study came from the California Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Colorado cutthroat trout specimens were collected by a number of early naturalists, including Swiss scientist and former Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz and internationally known fish expert and founding Stanford University President David Starr Jordan.
The new study, published online today in Molecular Ecology, follows up on a 2007 study by Metcalf and her team that indicated there were several places on the Front Range where cutthroat populations thought to be greenbacks by fish biologists were actually a strain of cutthroats transplanted from Colorado’s Western Slope in the early 1900s.
CU graduate researcher, Sierra Stowell (pictured here as a teenager) was a co-author of the study. She spends a lot of time in or near the water where cutthroat trout live.
Other co-authors on the new study included CU-Boulder Professor Andrew Martin and CU-Boulder graduate students Sierra Stowell, Daniel McDonald and Kyle Keepers; Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologist Kevin Rogers; University of Adelaide scientists Alan Cooper and Jeremy Austin; and Janet Epp of Pisces Molecular LLC of Boulder.
“With the insight afforded by the historical data, we now know with a great deal of certainty what cutthroat trout strains were here in Colorado before greenbacks declined in the early 20th century,” said Martin of CU’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. “And we finally know what a greenback cutthroat trout really is.”
Metcalf and her colleagues first collected multiple samples of tissue and bone from each of the ethanol-pickled trout specimens, obtaining fragments of DNA that were amplified and then pieced together like a high-tech jigsaw puzzle to reveal two genes of the individual specimens. The tests were conducted on two different continents under highly sterile conditions and each DNA sequencing effort was repeated several times for many specimens to ensure accuracy in the study, Metcalf said.
Roughly half of the study was conducted at CU-Boulder and half at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, where Metcalf had worked for two years. “By conducting repeatable research at two very different, state-of-the-art laboratories, we were able to show the Bear Creek trout was the same strain as the cutthroats originally occupying the South Platte River drainage.”
The Bear Creek trout strain is now being propagated in the Colorado Parks and Wildlife hatchery system and at the USFWS Leadville National Fish Hatchery.
In addition to identifying the Bear Creek cutthroat trout, Metcalf and her colleagues discovered a previously unknown cutthroat strain native to the San Juan Basin in southwestern Colorado that has since gone extinct. The study also confirmed that the yellowfin cutthroat, a subspecies from the Arkansas River headwaters that grew to prodigious size in Twin Lakes near Leadville, also had gone extinct.
Fortunately, most fish preserved by naturalists before 1900 were “fixed” in ethanol, which makes it easier for researchers to obtain reliable DNA than from fish preserved in a formaldehyde solution, a practice that later became popular. Prior to the new study — which included DNA from specimens up to about 150 years old — scientists working in ancient DNA labs had only performed similar research on ethanol-preserved museum vertebrate specimens less than 100 years old.
“One of the exciting things to come from this research project is that it opens up the potential for scientists to sequence the genes of other fish, reptiles and amphibian specimens preserved in ethanol further back in time than ever before to answer ecological questions about past diversity and distribution,” said Metcalf, who conducts her research at CU’s BioFrontiers Institute.
Funding for the study was provided by agencies of the Greenback Cutthroat Trout Recovery Team, including the USFWS, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and Trout Unlimited.
“I think in many cases success depends less on the application of a new technology and more on the convergence of people with shared interest and complementary skills necessary for solving difficult problems,” said Martin. “Our greenback story is really one about what can be discovered when dedicated and talented people collaborate with a shared purpose.”
“We’ve known for some time that the trout in Bear Creek were unique,” said Doug Krieger, senior aquatic biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Greenback Cutthroat Trout Recovery Team leader. “But we didn’t realize they were the only surviving greenback population.”
The decline of native cutthroats in Colorado occurred because of a combination of pollution, overfishing and stocking of native and non-native species of trout, said Metcalf. “It’s ironic that stocking nearly drove the greenback cutthroat trout to extinction, and a particularly early stocking event actually saved it from extinction,” she said.
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