Note: Our good friend, Bean, husband to beautiful Helen, son of good friend Ed Bowers - now deceased - and Jane Bowers, nephew of longtime, old time Telluride locals Jim and Kathy Bowers, crossed from this world to the next last Sunday, July 9,...
It's hard enough to let your child ride a motorcycle for the first time. Imagine he or she grows up to be a professional motocross stunt rider, like Chas Burbridge.
Chas and some of his friends who live on the Western Slope are coming home to Norwood for the Freestyle Motocross Exhibition on July 16 (Saturday) at the San Miguel County Fairgrounds. The event is a fundraiser for the Wright Stuff Community Foundation and its Prime Time Early Childhood Education Center. Chas and the other professional FMX team members travel all over the country and world to stage events like these, performing in front of stadiums full of thousands of people, but this show will also be a homecoming for the local boys.
You can see by looking at these two star charts from the Sky & Telescope website how much the Moon changes from day to day, night to night. It's fun to track our most intimate planetary companion across the backdrop of the fixed star...
By Tracy Shaffer
The Denver Art Museum's current offering is a mud pie for the senses. With the most basic of themes, earth, this global exhibition brings together time and place to reveal how the artist deals with dirt. Curators from around the museum present their earthenwares in ways that honor the simultaneous beauty and function of the Coors Porcelain Company's vessels, the aesthic simplicity and eternal popularity of the blue & white ceramic, and the exquisite work of Native American potter, Nampeyo, who built a name for herself and a family legacy through her creations.
Ridgway, Colorado, is so much more than a bedroom community for Telluride. The town is famous – or infamous – as the location for several movies, including "How the West Was Won," and one of actor John Wayne's latest and greatest, "True Grit," (1969), in which Wayne stars as Rooster Cogburn. Ridgway's True Grit Cafe is filled with John Wayne memorabilia, but as far as we know, no drunken, one-eyed federal marshals. And the Uncompaghre is a great source for trout fishing and the focus of Ridgway's fourth annual River Festival.
By J James McTigue
Alicia Stark, RN-BSN, began her career as a labor and delivery nurse in a high-risk hospital in Virginia.
She gained incredible medical experience, but realized she hadn’t learned anything about birth. This education came when she worked literally worlds away -- on the Navajo Reservation in Tuba City, Arizona.
Inspired by her experiences on the Reservation, she added certified Hypno-Birthing practitioner to her 
list of credentials. She is excited to share the methods of hypno-birthing and what she refers to as birthing “tools” to pregnant women in and around Telluride. She will be teaching a two-day, Hypno-Birthing class, from noon to 6 p.m. on June 25th and 26th at Shantihi Yoga Studio in Ridgway.
By Tracy Shaffer
Sunday afternoons at the Mercury Café are always an eclectic mix with swing dance, poetry slams and tarot readings on the calendar. But last week the place levitated to a place even the Tibetan meditation class would envy. The occasion was a concert by the brilliant jazz band, Zuri, featuring the angelic voice of Prudence Mabhena, to benefit the Cunningham Foundation.
Hosted by Zuri cellist James Bailey, the event opened with some “world-inspired, improvisational, high-energy jazz”, as vibes playing percussionist Greg Tanner Harris describes the Zuri sound (I’d have gone with “jaw-dropping, eye-popping” myself), while artist Laurie Maves painted the scene on canvas for auction. Soon Prudence rolled in gracefully; the most grounded human being I’ve ever seen, with a soul that emanates from her brown/black eyes. She is pure spirit and a set of pipes that will make you believe in God.
Mountainfilm in Telluride's theme, "Awareness into Action," comes to life in this story about Blue Planet Network.
December 10, 2001, just one year after the death of his wife from cancer, part-time Telluride local Jin Zidell took a walk around a lake near his home in Marin County, CA. When two runners passed by, Jin had an epiphany:
“Around the world for safe drinking water flashed in my mind."
By J James McTigue
The Baffin Babes are four rad chics with whom it would be fun to have a beer, go dancing, or ski tour 1200 kilometers in the Canadian Arctic over 80 days. Except you weren’t invited on the ski trip; they chose to do it all on their own.
Swedish sisters Vera and Emma Simonson, along with Norwegian friends Inga Tollefson and Kristin F. Olsen spent 80 days traveling along the eastern coast of Baffin Island, the largest island in Canada and the fifth largest island in the world.
At Mountainfilm in Telluride they will be presenting their trip, the glacial scenery, and remote Inuit villages they visited, as well as the fun they had, in a multimedia presentation at 6:45 Friday night at the Sheridan Opera House and 9:30 a.m. Monday at the Palm. (Palm showing is free to the public).
On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, about the time the Gulf oil spill was about to capped, Drew Ludwig decided to take a walk. A long walk. In August 2010, he traveled by foot 120 miles from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.
"I went to help. I went to work. I held lofty goals of an activist, and I wanted to use my hands."
And so he did, his hands and his unerring eye, recording images with his camera of people and places encountered along the way. Drew's motivation: break down the idea of "The Other," a complex concept lifted from the social sciences that defines the process by which individuals and groups create distance between themselves and those who do not seem to fit easily and comfortably into their cloistered worlds.
