Boulder bike park a winner!
Oct 12th
Parks and Recreation Department wins 2011 Colorado Parks and Recreation Association award for Valmont Bike Park
The City of Boulder’s Parks and Recreation Department was awarded the 2011 Colorado Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA) Columbine Award for Recreation Facility Design at Valmont Bike Park. The award was presented to Parks and Recreation Director Kirk Kincannon and Recreation Superintendent Alice Guthrie on Thursday, Sept. 29, at the CPRA Annual Conference in Grand Junction.
“This is a great honor for the City of Boulder Parks and Recreation Department,” said Kincannon. “Valmont Bike Park was designed and constructed with the community in mind. Through our extensive public input process, we were able to create a park that appeals to all levels of cyclists and provides a great recreation facility for families. We are thrilled to have this community treasure recognized by the Colorado Parks and Recreation Association.”
The opening of Valmont Bike Park in June 2011 was the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between the community and Boulder Parks and Recreation Department. A 40-acre, natural-surface bike park, Valmont was designed and developed in partnership with the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance (BMA), a group representing the area’s active, off-road cycling community. BMA brought volunteers, funding and sport-specific expertise to this ambitious project. BMA also agreed to help with fundraising and long-term stewardship of the bike facility and formed a partnership with the PLAY Boulder Parks Foundation as a mechanism to receive tax-deductible donations.
The park offers trails and features for all ages, riding abilities and styles. It also incorporates the latest sustainable design features including water conservation systems; LEEDTM certified building design, solar photovoltaic power and wildlife-proof recycling and trash containers.
The addition of the park and completion of multi-use trails leading to it elevated Boulder’s League of American Bicyclists’ status from gold to one of only three, Platinum-level bike friendly communities in the U.S. Valmont Bike Park provides new recreation opportunities for the community and competitive venues for local, national and international events.
Boulder cops get noise, trash duties
Oct 10th
In an effort to better serve residents, the city is restructuring the way code enforcement services are provided to the community. Beginning today, Monday, Oct. 10, the Boulder Police Department wil
l assume responsibility for quality-of-life code enforcement items, which will help to streamline service d
l assume responsibility for quality-of-life code enforcement items, which will help to streamline service d
elivery to th
e community.Code enforcement previously had been provided in the Planning & Development Services (P&DS) area. P&DS will continue to enforce building, housi
ng and zoning related codes.To ensure program efficiency, the police department has created a Code Enforcement Unit that will take over a number of enforcement items. The Code Enforcement Unit consists of two Code Officers and a Code Supervisor to enforce the following types of violations:
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The Boulder Police De
one in the community,” said Beckner.partment will continue to enforce violations for issues such as blocked rights-of-way, inoperable vehicles and visible emissions.Police Chief Mark Beckner says the changes will allow the city to enforce code violations in a more efficient manner. “We want to maintain and improve Boulder’s high quality of life for residents and businesses, and this focused approach to code enforcement will make that process more effective for every
P&DS will continue to provide inspections for concerns related to building safety, rental housing and zoning. This includes code violations such as:
| Building Safety | Zoning | Rental Housing |
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For more information about P&DS code violations, visit www.boulderplandevelop.net
and click on “Report a Violation,” or call 303-441-1880.
CU study: Lowly worms survive asteroid wipeout
Oct 10th
A new study of sediments laid down shortly after an asteroid plowed into the Gulf of Mexico 65.5 million years ago, an event that is linked to widespread global extinctions including the demise of big dinosaurs, suggests that lowly worms may have been the first fauna to show themselves following the global catastrophe.While the focus on the so-called K-T boundary extinction is often on the survival and proliferation of mammals, paleo-botanical studies show some of the earliest terrestrial ecosystems to emerge were dominated by low-diversity and opportunistic aquatic plants, said University of Colorado Boulder geological sciences Associate Professor Karen Chin. And while sediments laid down immediately following the impact event generally have relatively few animal fossils, new evidence from North Dakota shows networks of crisscrossing burrows less than three inches above the K-T boundary layer.
“Fossil burrows provide direct evidence of animal activity that occurred right at that spot, and these burrows are quite extensive,” said Chin, who said their characteristics suggest they were probably produced by worms. “To my knowledge, such burrows haven’t been documented in terrestrial environments this close to the K-T boundary. This is a glimpse of a world we don’t know very much about yet.”
While Chin and her colleagues are still working to understand the timing of the fossil burrows as they relate to the K-T extinction boundary, Chin said she believes that they likely were made within a few thousand years after the extinction event. Future studies should help narrow that window, said Chin, who also is curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Chin gave a presentation on the new findings at the 2011 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America being held this week in Minneapolis. Co-authors on the study were A.A. Ekdale of the University of Utah and Dean Pearson of the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum in Bowman, N.D.
The three-dimensional burrows were found at the interface of a layer of coal and a layer of siltstone in southwestern North Dakota by Pearson, who has spent many years studying K-T boundary sites in the state. The decomposing organic matter in the ancient environment would have provided a food source for the worms. A few of the burrows were topped by a thin layer of coal, suggesting that the underlying coal may contain additional, earlier worm burrows that are not readily apparent, Chin said.
The clay boundary layer laid down at the end of the Cretaceous Period is associated with high levels of iridium, an element rare in Earth’s crust but abundant in asteroids. The Manhattan-sized asteroid plowed into Earth at 150 times the speed of a jet airliner and is thought to have released about a billion times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, triggering tremendous dust and ash storms, wildfires, tsunamis, mega-earthquakes and dark, cold “nuclear winter” conditions for a time.
The North Dakota fossil worm burrows indicate the creatures probably were about the diameter of an average earthworm. The burrows indicate horizontal rather than vertical movement through the substrate, likely reflecting feeding activity, Chin said.
The study indicates the burrows were made in a peat-producing, bog-like environment that eventually was buried by sediment. Chin said the worms must have been capable of withstanding the challenging environmental stresses of flooded habitats, including prolonged inundation, low oxygen and acidic conditions.
Since the ancient burrows were filled by sediment, they actually are “positive casts” of the trails made by the worms. The burrows are examples of “trace fossils,” which also include tracks and fossilized feces, or coprolites. “When we reconstruct past environments, soft-bodied animals like worms get short-shrift since they don’t stand out in the fossil record like animals with mineralized skeletons,” said Chin. Ekdale, an expert on trace fossils, was key in analyzing the worm burrows, Chin said.
Chin said extensive work on plant fossils both before and after the K-T boundary event by Denver Museum of Nature and Science Chief Curator Kirk Johnson and his colleagues helped Chin and her research team to characterize the environment inhabited by the burrowers. Johnson’s research helped establish that terrestrial plants suffered heavy losses during the K-T extinction event, as did non-avian dinosaurs and many other terrestrial and marine organisms.
The K-T boundary commonly refers to the dividing line between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. Geologists now refer to it as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg boundary event. While a number of vertebrates survived the event — including birds, snakes, lizards, turtles, fish and small mammals — fossil burrows provide direct evidence of animal activity that skeletal fossils cannot show, said Chin. “The fact that the burrows are so close to the K-T boundary is one reason they are so exciting.”
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