And now, here’s Hal Walter with the weather! (Not brought to you by the Greater Crusty County-Weirdcliffe Association of Realtors®).
Looks like snow
Tag: Weirdcliffe
Starry, starry night
The old hometown came in for a little press yesterday as city folk tried to catch a glimpse of the Perseid meteor shower through all that neon.
The Dark Sky movement is serious business in Weirdcliffe, as well it should be. It’s one of the area’s natural resources, and thus a natural draw. Sayeth The Old Gray Lady, “Four out of five Americans live in places where they can no longer see the Milky Way.” This, frankly, is a national tragedy.
When we lived east of town, Herself and I spent an evening stretched out on the deck, marveling at the Perseids. It was like getting caught in a celestial hailstorm, or maybe standing on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, boldly going where plenty of folks can’t go no mo’.
Divide(s) and conquer
This should be amusing — the Colorado junior/senior state road championships will be held in and around my old hometown of Weirdcliffe next June.
I found Crusty County a tough spot for road riding, if you define “road” as “pavement.” We lived 10 miles east of town, up a dirt road in the Wet Mountains, and said road was basically impassable on a road bike even in good weather. The drop from our house to the county road was a winding, rapid 430 vertical feet in one mile, and what went down eventually had to come back up.
So, since I’ve always hated driving to a training ride, I mostly rode cyclo-cross bikes everywhere, and a guy could piece together one hell of an eclectic workout that way, especially when the ride started at 8.800 feet.
That said, there was some stellar paved-road riding in the vicinity — the old Hardscrabble Century used some of it, as did a century out of Pueblo and a comparative newcomer, Ride Westcliffe. And it sounds like the state champs would like to use quite a piece of it.
If the organizers get to lay out a road-race course that includes McKenzie Junction, Wixxon Divide, Bigelow Divide and Greenhorn Divide en route to Bishop’s Castle and back, well, there will be fun for all, excepting the fat bastards, like yours truly. The only flat spot on the course is likely to be the start/finish line.
I always wanted to put on a Three Peaks-style cyclo-cross at Bear Basin Ranch, but we had enough trouble persuading the Boulder fairies to drive to Bibleburg. Throw in a couple thousand more feet of vertical, another 75 miles of driving, and the chance of meeting an actual bear on course, and the moniker “Wet” Mountains would have taken on a whole new meaning.
Patriot games
The tinfoil-Stetson assclowns in my old stomping grounds of Weirdcliffe are taking a beating in the lib’rul media today over plans by the Southern Colorado Patriots Club to march with unloaded firearms in the annual Fourth of July parade.
The local paper, Jim Little’s Wet Mountain Tribune, has a piece from the firing line, as it were. Seems a ruckus ensued when the “patriots” promised that “as many as 500 marchers, bearing firearms, would be marching in the parade as a show of support for 2nd Amendment rights.”
Ho, ho. I hope they plan on busing a few of these nimrods in. The 2010 Census found only 568 persons total living in Weirdcliffe, with 4,205 in the entirety of Crusty County.
Don’t expect Obamacare to provide you with free oxygen tanks for the hike, peckerwoods. Look to the Invisible Hand of the Free Market to prop you up while you’re lugging that 8-pound AK-47 around in the summer sun at 7,888 feet.
Footloose redux
People sometimes ask me, “Mr. Mad Dog, dude, sir, why on earth did you ever abandon the spectacular high-country beauty of Crusty County for the gritty unreality of the clusteropolis known as Bibleburg?”
The answer lies (or rather, jogs) here. A few more years on that wind-scoured rockpile outside Weirdcliffe and I’d have started running barefoot in the snow, too. What the fuck, it was only 10 miles to the liquor store, and most of it was on pavement.
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