Outdoors

Water, water everywhere – and I drank plenty.

3 Musketeers On Friday, Clint and I decided to take a half day off from Telluride Inside... and Out. He headed off to assist on a Telluride Adaptive Sports Program hike with a favorite client. My fact-finding mission was mostly play: What's all the fuss about the river sport du jour, Stand-Up Paddling?

Bettie Hastings picked me up bright and early in her Mini convertible and we headed to town to rendezvous with our friend Susan Dalton at Jagged Edge. In summer, Jagged Edge is central ops for the Telluride Kayak School, where we hooked up with our instructor Andy Bagnall. On a cloudy day, order up Andy. I mean the guy is sunshine incarnate. He radiates nothing but positive energy juju.

It might seem strange to vacation in Crested Butte when you live in Telluride. Why leave one small mining-turned-ski town for another small mining-turned-ski town? Some may ask—why leave Telluride at all in the summer?

Ice Cream on CB's Main Street

 Yet, like many Telluridians, my husband, Andy, and I crave adventure. We crave travel. We crave escape. Indeed, the very cravings that pulled us into this valley are the same that push us out from time to time.

 We needed to get out of our house for a while. To get away from our same routines. And most importantly, we needed to re-explore a town we hadn’t been to in few years and see how it stacked up to our own.

 We’d heard the biking in Crested Butte was amazing. As relatively new addicts of the sport, we were eager to get our wheels muddy and test its trails. When we’d been to the town several years before, we’d gone to this astoundingly good coffee shop called Camp 4 Coffee. Would it be as good as we’d remembered?

 

[click "Play" to hear Eileen's interview with Lo Snyder]

 

By Eileen Burns

Rope, Boots and Hat Grab your cowboy hat and boots folks, The San Miguel Basin Fair and Rodeo is in town and promises to be jam packed full of events and competitions for everyone in the family.  From the adrenaline rush of a pro cowboy taking a wild and thrashing 8 second bull ride around the arena, to little Johnny next door, hanging on with sheer guts, as he tumbles through his first mutton busting competition, Norwood Colorado is the place to be this weekend.  The fair grounds are located just 40 minutes from downtown Telluride, on Wrights Mesa.  The CPRA Rodeos will take place both Friday and Saturday evenings starting at 7:00 pm.  Entry fee to Rodeo is only $9.00.  There will be plenty of vendor stands with food, pop and beer, including the kids' favorites: sno-cones and cotton candy.

By J James McTigue

 


In Rome they’d throw people in a ring with a lion for entertainment; in Telluride we have The Lunar Cup. It’s an event that shouldn’t really be watched—it’s frightening and a little disturbing, yet at the same time, extremely difficult not to watch.

Lunar Cup has a little of everything—free-riders throwing back flips, skiers and boarders racing down a snow-covered scree-field, and even a little nudity. Former event organizer and current announcer, Herb Manning summed up the highlight of this year’s Lunar Cup saying, “Everyone came out fairly unscathed.”

So, what is Lunar Cup exactly?

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.

The following is from an on-and-off series about summer hikes by Deb Dion Kees, who blogs for Telluride HIking Guide.

IMG_1198Don’t look down, I reminded myself. I could feel my breathing get choppy, and even though we were above 13,000 feet in elevation, I knew it wasn’t from the exertion of being at altitude—it was fear. The serrated ridgeline, sharp and snow-covered, stretched out hundreds of feet ahead of me and I dug my trail running shoes into each icy step, hoping it would hold. Don’t look down.

It was probably a couple of weeks too early in the summer to do it, and I definitely should have brought an ice axe, but the Telluride Peak Traverse still ranks as my all-time favorite hike. The Traverse is one of the new routes in the upcoming third edition of Telluride Hiking Guide, and even later in the season, when the high alpine basins and the knife-edge of a ridgeline are no longer coated with stubborn spring snow, it is a serious adventure.

Double-points weekend in all disciplines + free lift ticket for competitors

MainHeaderLogo July marks the return of Full Tilt in Telluride, part of the 2011 Mountain States Cup Series, the largest full-discipline (endurance and gravity) race series in the United States. Mountain Village is not only amped to be stop number six – July 8 through July 10 – but also host of the Colorado State Championships and double-points weekend. For this year’s Full Tilt weekend, the various race disciplines include cross-country, short track, downhill, super-D, and mountain-cross.

“The Town of Mountain Village and the Mountain States Cup Series (MSC) have aligned with Momentum Trail Concepts to bring a world class mountain-cross course to Full Tilt in Telluride,” said MSC Race Director Keith Darner. “Under the direction of Steve Wentz and Matt Thompson, Momentum Trail have helped design and build one of their patented and amazingly fun mountain-cross courses. Having such a course sets Full Tilt apart from the other stops in the series, and the locale of it will allow spectators the opportunity to get up close and personal with the riders.” 

[click"Play" to hear Erik Dalton's description of River Festival]

 

RwayRiverFest11.jpg. 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.

 

  Katie Spotz, Atlantic rower and now land racer, has had some setbacks in her attempt to set a new pairs bicycle record in the Race Across America with her partner Sam Williams. See a previous Telluride Inside...