Lifestyle

The seventh annual Mountains to the Desert bike ride is set for Saturday, September 25, 2010. Riders can start from Telluride or Norwood, and there are two options for routing from each start. Early registration is $100, fee increases to $125 on September 1....


The Ah Haa School for the Arts in Telluride has classes for all ages, on any number of subjects. Along with our enthusiastic fellow students, Telluride Inside... and Out was getting smart about making bread (no, not an investing class) at the home of Larry and Sally Simpson on Saturday, August 28.

Our "professors" were Carole and Milt Quam, long-time breadmakers from California. As Milt puts it, "Carole and I regard ourselves as 'serious home bakers'.  We’ve been baking seriously for the last 15 or so years. Originally we identified with a group of whole grain bakers, most doing their baking in wood-fired ovens. There were some very talented bakers, as well as oven builders in that group."

[click "Play" to listen to Ashley Deppen about faux furs] She's into fabulous fakes. Ashley Deppen of Telluride's hot clothing emporium, Two Skirts, is taking about faux furs for fall/winter. (Nice alliteration, no?)It all began on the Chanel runway: models...

[click "Play" for Susan's interview with Gary Lincoff]

2010HarvestAug14Hollinbeck The Telluride Mushroom Festival, Thursday, August 26  – Sunday, August 29, bills itself as the nation's "oldest mycological conference exploring all things fungal." Which is saying a tasty mouthful since fungi have been around for a very long time. A lot longer than people, perhaps 500 million years. (The earliest known picture of a mushroom was found on a wall painting in the ruins of Pompeii.)

Fungi used to be classified as part of the plant kingdom. They become a kingdom of their own because fungi differ in biochemistry and structure from plants and cannot synthesize their own food. The mushrooms people collect are just the fruiting bodies of mycelium, a sentient cobweb-like web of cells. These "fruits" are created in order to manufacture spores for reproduction. Because so much shroom activity occurs underground in the fungal version of the world wide web, mushrooms themselves appear to pop up quite suddenly over night.
743521302_QQv5L-M The Telluride Ski Resort, host of the LG FIS Snowboard World Cup (December 15-18, 2010), has teamed up with Tschana Breslin, Senior Physiologist in the High Performance Dept. of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association to offer tips and techniques to get in great shape for the upcoming winter season. Trainer to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team, Breslin shares her workout plans and secrets that keep all our Olympic athletes in top competitive shape, yet are easy enough for all winter sports lovers to follow. 
 
1.  Increase Overall Aerobic Fitness
Both skiers and snowboarders benefit immensely from increasing overall aerobic activity to prepare for the season. Trail running and regular jogging, road and mountain biking, and cross training are favorites. Hiking up is a great activity, but hiking down is great for eccentric leg work, key for skiers and snowboarders.
[click "Play" for Art Goodtimes' take on the Mushroom Festival]

IMG_5180 "The mushrooms have two strange properties: the one that they yield so delicious a meat; the other that they come up so hastily, as in a night, and yet they are unsown," Francis Bacon, "Naturall Histories," 1624.

Probably the best mushroom harvest in years has upped the ante for the 30th Annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, Aug. 26-29.

Wild mushrooms have always prompted wild debate, because they make great eats, but also can kill you. In some parts of the world – Telluride is one such address - mushrooms are prized for their culinary properties. But elsewhere on the map, mycophobes associate fungi with witches and serpents oh my.

IMGP1420Friday afternoon in Telluride, Tim Erdman called: Did we want to go mushroom hunting with him Saturday morning? Robert Allen and Susie Coit would be joining us as well. We had never hunted with Tim but enjoy his company, so why not. Turns out he is as addicted to the hunt as we are, so even when we all agreed it was well past time for lunch, we couldn't resist adding more mushrooms to an already impressive stash.

The Telluride Mushroom Festival takes place next weekend, so we got a bit of a jump on the event. When the word goes out in Telluride that boletes are everywhere, it's time to be in the hills.

by D. Dion

_T9J9432 The first time Full Tilt came to Mountain Village, I went up to see my friend race on the downhill course. She is a pro downhill mountain biker, but I hadn’t ever watched a race, and even though I sat with her as she put on her padded suit of body armor I still was in disbelief as I hiked up the course. It looked impossible to ride, full of huge drops, severe turns and impenetrable trees and rocks. Could this be the actual course?

It was. This was probably ten years ago, and already mountain biking had progressed far beyond the old hard-tail bikes and slow, smooth rides I started on. Front shocks, rear shocks, beefy wheel hubs and a full-face helmet—and the body armor—pushed the sport to a whole new level. You could have fit a Subaru beneath some of the jumps my friend went off that day, and the wipeouts were so spectacular that I wished I’d brought a video camera. I was hooked.