Posts tagged house
Boulder Art and Jazz Fest May 5-6
May 5th
The 7th annual Boulder Arts, Craft and Jazz Festival kicked off today Saturday May 5th and runs through Sunday May 7. It features music all day from a main stage on the Pearl Street Mall at the court house. Other musicians are spread up and down the mall. There are literally hundreds of arts and crafts tents from one end of the mall to the other. Interspersed are food tents with everything from Mexican, Oriental to American. It was a beautiful day on Saturday at the festival with a friendly relaxed atmosphere reminiscent of a Boulder old school event. A lot of Boulderites were present with a fine mixture of tourists. This is the big event of the year that kicks off summer in Downtown Boulder. The event is promoted by the folks from the Dickens Store who started the original Bands on the Bricks many years ago They really know how to put on a family event. You don’t want to miss this one because it was not a crush of people who have been drinking all day. Of course the bars and restaurants are all open on Pearl Street and they were packed with festival goers as well. The theme is early 1969 Woodstock and for those of you who were there, it is all love, peace and music at the The 7th annual Boulder Art and Jazz Festival. The music is excellent too. Bands played all day today and will start on the stage at 11:00 am til 6:30 pm: see the line up below. This appears to be the largest authentic music festival in Boulder. There are some others but they take place in theaters and bars and not on one stage. The Boulder Creek Festival is of course the very largest muical event just 3 weeks away on Memorial Day weekend with 5 music and dance stages. But Sunday afternoon will be the highlight of the festival. The event is a charity event for Olive Branch a non-prot organization which brings resources and opportunities to widows and orphans in Rwanda and Uganda. They are active in building Orphanages, Medical Clinics and Schools in this country!
Bear facts: Feed them and they will come
Apr 26th
Pilot program increasing education and enforcement on bear attractants begins this week
The City of Boulder and the Colorado Parks and Wildlife are partnering on an Urban Black Bear Education and Enforcement pilot program that begins on Saturday, April 28. The purpose of the program is to explore the effectiveness of education and enforcement on improving the ways residential trash is secured and other bear attractants are minimized in western Boulder. The pilot neighborhood includes approximately 600 residences west of Ninth Street, north of Baseline Road and south of Arapahoe Avenue.
On Saturday, April 28, staff and volunteers will begin going door-to-door in the pilot neighborhood and provide residents with information on removing bear attractants from their property. They will also discuss the existing state and city laws requiring trash to be secured from bears. Increased enforcement of the trash regulations will begin in June.
A public open house to provide information and answer questions about the pilot program will be held on Monday, April 30, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., at Flatirons Elementary School, 1150 Seventh St.
Residents are encouraged to participate in an online survey to help determine effective strategies to keep bears out of trash at www.boulderwildlifeplan.net.
Some tips for preventing human-bear conflicts include the following:
- Store trash indoors or in a way that does not allow bears to scatter it. (This is required by city ordinance.)
- Store birdfeeders indoors at night from April to November.
- Store pet food inside.
- Keep BBQ grills clean.
- Keep garage and home doors closed.
For more information about the pilot program, contact Val Matheson, City of Boulder Urban Wildlife, 303-441-3004.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife offers information on how to safely coexist with bears. For more information, visit http://www.wildlife.state.co.us/bears.
If you experience problems with bears or other wildlife, call Boulder Police Department 303-441-3333 or Colorado Parks and Wildlife 303-291-7227.
Micah True (El Caballo Blanco’s) spirit is finally free
Apr 15th
When I first crossed paths in the early ‘80s with the man who eventually became known as Caballo Blanco, I was running down the Mount Sanitas trail and he was running up. We didn’t speak, maybe nodded.He was wearing thin nylon jogging shorts, running shoes and had a water bottle in his hand. He was tanned and lean and had unruly, long, dirty-blond hair.
In those days I was running 4-5 miles at a time and I would later learn that he was running 15-20. He had a nice-looking, tan, young woman with him. Every time I saw him in the passing years he was dressed the same. Forgive me if it gets fuzzy here because he always seemed a little ghost-like: he was there and then gone like he was barely tethered to the earth. Of course his hero and spirit guide was Geronimo of the Bedonkohe Apache tribe, who was thought to be able to appear and disappear at will. And of course, I wasn’t taking notes.
In 1989, I had been evicted from a mine cabin in James Canyon—the one with only a wood stove for utilities. The small creek passing by was my source of water and kerosene lamps were my only light. I typed my first news story for the Colorado Daily in that cabin under the ever- weakening illumination of those lamps. Micah was moving out of a small room appendaged onto a house on Magnolia Road that was renting for $110 dollars a month. He asked if I was interested. I said I was and rented it. He said he wanted to get out of the winters and was driving to Guatemala.
After that he visited me often when he came back in the summers and told me of running through the mountains and beaches, where camposinos would wave and yell “Caballo Blanco,” due, I guess, to his base skin color and shoulder length blond hair. Micah was a vegetarian and lived frugally by any standard, sleeping in a truck with a camper parked in a north Boulder industrial area. He bought another truck and made money in the summer with an under-the-table moving business—no liability insurance or regulatory approval. Many of his customers were friends. He told me one time he was driving a load of tightly arranged furniture to Colorado Springs but when he got there, a couch that was packed in the open back of the pickup had disappeared; probably popping out somewhere along I-25. He drove back and forth looking but never found it and ultimately had to pay for a replacement.
Each summer, he made enough money to go back to Guatemala. But there was a lot of violence in Guatemala at that time and in the summer of ’93 he met a group of Tarahumara Indios in the Leadville 100 and followed them back to Copper Canyon in the Mexican State of Chihuahua–a canyon larger, deeper and more complex than the U.S.’s Grand Canyon. The Tarahumara, who rejected assimilation with Spanish culture, had migrated thousands of miles from the south over the centuries before reaching that sanctuary. There were no roads, towns or utilities, and little water through much of the canyon so the Tarahumara were spread throughout the canyon.
So a subculture of runners known as Raramuri sprung up, running hundreds of miles in a few days carrying news to the widely spaced villages, or just for fun, and Micah knew he had found his physical if not his spiritual home. He would spend the nights and eat meals in Tarahumara stone huts for as little as two dollars.
He finally built a small adobe home for himself in the canyon. For several years he returned to the U.S. and Colorado particularly. One summer, while racing in the Hardrock 100 near Telluride, he got lost in a snow storm on one of the three passes the race course covered and had to be hauled out on a burro. When found he was wearing two large garbage bags over his shorts and T shirt. One summer, he took up bicycling to give his feet a rest and somehow crashed coming down Left Hand Canyon–knocking himself out. When found, he argued and lost against the ambulance ride, costing him $1,700. At the hospital, they told him he had severely dislocated his shoulder and it would cost $800 to reset it so he checked himself out of the hospital, walked across the parking lot to the office of a chiropractor/friend who set it right there without any sedation.
Micah was more of a philosophical survivalist than political activist but at the request of a Native American girlfriend he went to a large protest at the Nuclear Test Site in Nevada, where he broke through a gap in the security and headed off running into the desert. Seventeen hours later he gave himself up and they escorted him off the site without filing any charges against him.
By early 2000, his moving business was waning under the threats of regulation and sanctions so Micah began to envision—as a way of making a living–guiding “gringos” into Copper Canyon for running vacations. It started slowly but somehow he hung on and more and more people came down. In 2003 Micah organized the first Copper Canyon Ultra Marathon to aid the Raramuri, and invited world-class ultramarathoners to compete. The prizes were generally large amounts of corn. With that race, Micah become somewhat a legend in the distance running community, and Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run brought Micah and the Tarahumara to the world’s attention. No longer was Micah True such a ghostly figure; connected as he was to the world by a best selling book and the internet. And the Tarahumara, their culture, their style of running and their dispossessed status in Mexico–had become a well-known topic internationally.
Given this new-found notoriety, Micah became much in demand as a speaker. He took only expenses and talked mainly about the Tarahumara. On his seasonal migration back to the U.S. this year he stopped in the Gila National Forest in SW New Mexico on his way to Phoenix and took off on a planned 12-mile run. He never returned and was found dead four days later in a ravine. No cause has been determined for his death as of this writing.
But I think it was just his time. He came to Earth as an unwilling Angel and found his cause with the people of Copper Canyon. He died doing what he loved and left a legacy: The ultramarathoner world has vowed to continue the races in Copper Canyon and keep the light shining on the people there. I think Micah’s work was done and his soul is now free from the bonds of gravity.