The FAA just lobbed a grenade into Pitkin County airport voting 

Sneak Peek of the Week

Pitkin County citizens want to divest commissioners of their power. The FAA just flexed with a warning for why they shouldn’t.

Just hours before the Pitkin County commissioners meeting Oct. 22, Commissioner Greg Poschman told The Colorado Sun “another shoe was going to drop” on a controversy that has surrounded the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport for decades and has come to a head during the 2024 election, with two relevant measures on the county’s ballot.

But it was more like the landing gear was about to become jammed on all jets hoping to touch down on the 400-foot-long runway between the Elk Mountains and the Roaring Fork River where millionaires jostle with billionaires for takeoff position and locals to live out their dreams in one of the most beautiful spots in Colorado.

The news was a letter dated Oct. 17 from the Federal Aviation Administration warning that if a measure on the local ballot seeking to modify the rights and powers of the Pitkin County commissioners regarding the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport passes, the agency might be forced to pull back millions of dollars in funding.

That money is supposed to go to many things, but perhaps most importantly, the runway, which Poschman described as “well over a decade, if not two decades, past its replacement time.”

“(The county) has been putting Band-Aids on it for quite a long time and the FAA has told us already that they’re not going to pay for those patches and repairs anymore,” he added. “So we had to pay it out of pocket the last one or two times. And that’s over $10 million, I think, by now.”

The group wanting to modify the powers of the commissioners through ballot Question 200 is Our Airport Our Vote. Their stance is that the commissioners have too much power to make decisions about not only the airport but all of Pitkin County.

Our Airport Our Vote’s biggest issue: the widening of the runway, which they say will accommodate bigger planes. Those planes will carry more passengers to the already crowded valley. They say only a minority of stakeholders want it widened, including “pillars of the community” like Aspen Skiing Company, Belly Up Aspen and the Aspen Music Festival. And when they set about collecting the necessary 1,200 signatures to get Question 200 on the ballot, they said people stepped up from “pockets all over the county,” who rallied around the idea of having a say in Aspen’s future.

In September, the commissioners, backed by a group called A Whole Lot of People for a Better Airport, submitted their own ballot question — 1C — which would ultimately block Question 200 because of a clause written into their amendment.

The 200 folks fought back, calling that move unconsitutional.

A fight seemed to be revving up, with both sides claiming their position is better for the future of Pitkin County.

The question now is will the FAA’s flex change how residents vote — if they haven’t already voted?

Aspen Mayor Torre said he’s unsure but that some people are taking the letter’s assertions “as another sign of the misdirection that has plagued this problem.”

For more on this, head over to The Sun early next week.

The Playground

Erin Block writes poetry about hunting. And no, it’s not about the killing.

Erin Block spends her days as the University of Colorado’s e-resources metadata and reporting manager organizing digital files supporting students and researchers on the Boulder campus.

But in her free time, she’s killing animals and writing about it.

Her poetry is linear, stacked in stanzas. But she has been described as “speaking the language of Colorado.” That’s an apt description if you think Colorado’s dialect is hunting and gardening, fly fishing and fly tying. And then there’s the poetry she writes in her new collection, which won the 2024 Colorado Book Award for poetry and has been fawned over (no pun) by everyone from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Project to Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and the most popular hunting podcaster of all time, Hal Herring, who only interviews brilliant people (for, like, 2 hours at a time).

“How You Walk Alone in the Dark” covers everything from channeling Virginia Woolf (“each morning, another stone in my pocket”) to the month of August (“the smell of snakes in tall grass”) to the price of red meat and putting a bullet in wildlife. And Block approaches it all with what her fellow poet Gillian Wigmore calls a half-feral style full of surprise and wonder.

But it’s one thing to talk about a poet-hunter and another to hear a poet-hunter’s thoughts. So we asked Block a few questions as a teaser for a podcast Tracy did with her on The Daily Sun-Up, airing Friday.

Tracy: What is “How You Walk Alone in the Dark” about, if a book of poetry can be “about” one thing?

Erin: I think my book is about the grief you must learn to carry, moving through the world, loving mortal things. Nothing is static and we are always gaining and losing experiences, places, people and beloved animals, and finally we lose ourselves.

Tracy: What, for you, makes hunting a more desirable way to be in nature than, say, hiking just to hike or mountain biking?

Erin: I don’t think “more desirable” is how I would put it, but I’ve personally found it fulfilling to participate in nature as a part of it, not as something moving through. When I hunt is the only time I feel truly present. In NPR’s Wild Card podcast, filmmaker Sterlin Harjo said that to him, “hunting feels like praying,” because you’re so close to life and death, almost in a middle realm, and “you’re hyper-aware and have nothing but yourself to contend with.” I feel that all very deeply. It forces me to pay attention to small things on a level that is both rewarding and a constant reflection about the impact I leave on the environment around me. It’s actually a lot like writing.

Tracy: What is something surprising that hunting taught you about yourself?

Erin: Hunting has taught me I can think fast and be clutch. In general I’m a slow thinker and slow writer and decisions fill me with dread. But I’ve learned I can be otherwise. I can have instinct.

Tracy: Have you harvested anything this year — and is it a cop out to call killing an animal “harvesting” it?

Erin: I have not. And while I understand why the term “harvesting” is used, to me, it doesn’t accurately portray the action as I’ve experienced it. Harvesting seems to either imply something that’s available, and you simply go out and get; or it seems too cleaned up from the reality of killing an animal to sustain yourself. One of the poems in my book is titled “The Price of Red Meat” and it better explains my thoughts.

Tracy: How do poetry and hunting intersect?

Erin: I recently read that in India, the first poem is said to have been written after a sage who had retreated to a forest watches a hunter’s arrow pierce a bird. Being so overcome with shock and emotion, he writes a poem. Thinking about the first poem in a culture being about witnessing a successful hunt seems fitting and profound.

Tracy: What are you serving for Thanksgiving?

Erin: Turkey! From the grocery store. See answer to question 4.

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Breaking Trail

Starlink is cramming our skies with car-size satellites. Astrophysicists and a Colorado visionary are saying make it stop.

More than 50,000 satellites could be orbiting the Earth by 2030, up from the 9,000 cruising through the sky last night. And according to a consortium of 120 astronomy, astrophysics and space experts from several top universities, that could lead to 29 tons of metal re-entering the atmosphere per day as those satellites are retired one 2,000-pound machine at a time.

Not surprisingly, the majority of the metal hunks connecting us to the presidential debate as well as “Gilmore Girls” reruns are owned by Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX. In 2023, 70% of all satellite launches were for Starlink, which has applied to the Federal Communications Commission for more than 30,000 satellite licenses.

But in a report sent out Oct. 24, the CoPIRG Foundation found that at peak deployment of these disposable satellites, those 29 tons of metal will be “almost like a car falling from space into our atmosphere every hour.”

That could be dangerous to people and the environment, CoPIRG says, yet the FCC has categorically excluded satellite licenses from environmental reviews since 1986. Now, CoPIRG executive director Danny Katz and the scientists are calling on the FCC to jump in with new regulations that can prevent satellite companies from making a mess of space that could take decades to clean up. Filling the sky with satellites is a new frontier, they add, “and we should save ourselves a lot of trouble by making sure we move forward in a way that doesn’t cause major problems for our future.”

Not to mention humans lose something when they can’t see the cosmos for the space junk that’s jamming it up. As Robert Trotta said in this essay, “The night sky is humankind’s only truly global common, shared by all of us across civilizations and millennia.”

The Guide

Head to Rollinsville’s Haunted Stage Stop, created by a fiddle player who’s undecided on spiders

Andy Reiner can’t stop with the spooky thoughts.

For instance: “As you’ve probably figured out there’s an inner dark side that is hiding within each of us.”

Or: “To ask if I like spiders better than werewolves, well, that’s not a fair question.”

Or this one: “Well, there’s supposed to be a shot of whiskey in the bar for a particular ghost. I never told anyone where that shot is, and I still haven’t. But every time I feel for it, it’s gone. And it’s not really in a findable place.”

But it all makes sense when you find out that Reiner, who lives in mid-Gilpin County (or as he likes to call it, Giltucky,) is the creator of a three-story haunted house in the 150-year-old Stage Stop in Rollinsville, at the intersection of Colorado 119 and the road that leads to Moffat Tunnel.

Reiner has designed, built, produced and directed the haunted house since 2022, following a stint taking people through a haunted neighborhood in Fern Cliff (near Allenspark) in 2020 and transforming the Gold Hill Inn into a haunted space for a two-night, music-paired pop-up called SpookyGrass in 2021.

The Stage Stop has been his favorite endeavor, he says, because it happens in the tiny community of Rollinsville, which has grown from a pretty dead place economically speaking to a vibrant corner “full of people putting in all of their effort to make good things” like Toss Pizza, Howlin’ Wind Brewery, the Gold Dirt Distillery and Melt Coffee.

And he likes how the Stage Stop is far enough out there that he and his crew of mostly volunteers buck the trends of bigger haunted houses. Those build walls to increase claustrophobia and hide a building’s inner workings, he says. “But the Stage Stop is this historic building so we try to amplify its inherent creepiness.”

It’s also staffed by different volunteers every night, including a revolving cast of little girls dressed as baby-doll-clutching serial killers. Zombie cowboys leap out of strobe-lit corners where you can’t see them even if you’re looking. In the blacked out spider room, human-size arachnids creep toward you (but they can’t touch you). And with the Haunted Stage Stop being a musician’s baby, Reiner and friends created their own soundtrack.

But maybe best of all, Reiner gives as much of the proceeds as he can to the Timberline Fire Protection District. Because these days fires can be scarier than anything and the volunteers who fight them are desperately needed.

Go here for tickets and enter COLORADOSUN at checkout. You’ll get $3 off, compliments of Reiner.

Happy haunting,

— Tracy

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