My Colorado Thoughts

11/13/2021

Quotes
“I like the mountains because they make me feel small. 'They help me sort out what's important in life.”
― Mark Obmascik

You are not the sum of your accomplishment or failures.”
― Carla Laureano

“In those days, Doc Susie used medications interchangeably between humans and animals. That was before pharmaceutical houses discovered a fundamental economic principle. Label a medication for human consumption, and a higher price could be charged.”
― Virginia Cornell

Ice Worms
On high up glaciers you can find tiny worms by the hundreds of thousands. They live on snow algae, bacteria and anything else that is in the snow. NASA is said to be studying ice worms and how or why they manage to survive. --Taken from High Country News November 2021

Spencer Penrose
Spencer (Spence) Penrose graduated from Harvard at the bottom of his class. He took money his father gave him at graduation and went out West to make his fortune. A letter from his brother, Richard.a successful geologist, and Spence's friend Charles Tutt, encouraged him to come to the Cripple Creek mining district. Tutt loaned Penrose enough to buy half interest in Tutt's real estate business.

The business included the C.O.D. Mine. It made money as a mine but Tutt and Penrose thought they would do better by processing raw ore from other's mines. With another partner, Charles MacNiell, they started the Colorado-Philadelphia Processing Company. By then Penrose was a millionaire. He invested in a copper mine in Utah and moved from Cripple Creek to nearby Colorado Springs.

In Colorado Springs, Penrose bought a hotel and casino which was outside of the city limits because the city was "dry" in 1916. He and his wife Julia built the hotel of his dreams, the Broadamore, the only five star hotel in Colorado.

Spencer and Julie Penrose acted as philanthropists, giving strong financial support to major civic projects in Colorado Springs. Their legacy projects include the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Pikes Peak Highway, and the Glockner-Penrose Hospital (now Penrose-St. Francis Health Services).

They founded El Pomar Foundation on December 17, 1937. With a mission “to enhance, encourage, and promote the future and current well-being of the people of Colorado,” El Pomar Foundation continues as a grant making organization. From an initial combined gift of $21 million, the assets of the Foundation now exceed $600 million. Its grants have yielded more than $1.2 billion in results for the state of Colorado.

Radioactive in our Backyard
Near a Ute Mountain reservation in Utah stands the only the only mill to process radioactive waste material in the United States. White Mountain has become the destination for radioactive waste from around the world.
The Ute Mountain tribe has protested the mill and requests others to join them.

Stephanie Malin of Colorado State University explains that lands given to Native Americans as reservations later turned out to be over coal and natural gas deposits and uranium. Today federal and state regulations about worker and safety are not uniform or carried out equally.

Over 500 abandoned uranium mines are on Navajo land. The tribes thought the uranium processing would be a short period operation but the mill started taking in uranium waste from contaminated sites from across the country, a process that continues today.

End of the Line
I ate a radioactive taco but there was a lot of fall out.
Hear they had a radioactive spill at the primate lab cafeteria, and now they have fission chimps.
I can't turn off my radio, it's radioactive.

Bob Cross

11/14/2021 04:39:37 pm

The Ballad of the Ice-Worm Cocktail

by Robert W. Service
From Bar-room Ballads

Rare and Antiquarian 234x60 To Dawson Town came Percy Brown from London on the Thames.
A pane of glass was in his eye, and stockings on his stems.
Upon the shoulder of his coat a leather pad he wore,
To rest his deadly rifle when it wasn't seeking gore;
The which it must have often been, for Major Percy Brown,
According to his story was a hunter of renown,
Who in the Murrumbidgee wilds had stalked the kangaroo
And killed the cassowary on the plains of Timbuctoo.
And now the Arctic fox he meant to follow to its lair,
And it was also his intent to beard the Artic hare...
Which facts concerning Major Brown I merely tell because
I fain would have you know him for the Nimrod that he was.
Now Skipper Grey and Deacon White were sitting in the shack,
And sampling of the whisky that pertained to Sheriff Black.
Said Skipper Grey: "I want to say a word about this Brown:
The piker's sticking out his chest as if he owned the town."
Said Sheriff Black: "He has no lack of frigorated cheek;
He called himself a Sourdough when he'd just been here a week."
Said Deacon White: "Methinks you're right, and so I have a plan
By which I hope to prove to-night the mettle of the man.
Just meet me where the hooch-bird sings, and though our ways be rude
We'll make a proper Sourdough of this Piccadilly dude."

Within the Malamute Saloon were gathered all the gang;
The fun was fast and furious, and loud the hooch-bird sang.
In fact the night's hilarity had almost reached its crown,
When into its storm-centre breezed the gallant Major Brown.
And at the apparation, with its glass eye and plus-fours,
From fifty alcoholic throats resounded fifty roars.
With shouts of stark amazement and with whoops of sheer delight,
They surged around the stranger, but the first was Deacon White.
"We welcome you," he cried aloud, "to this the Great White Land.
The Artic Brotherhood is proud to grip you by the hand.
Yea, sportsman of the bull-dog breed, from trails of far away,
To Yukoners this is indeed a memorable day.
Our jubilation to express, vocabularies fail...
Boys, hail the Great Cheechako!" And the boys responded: "Hail!"

"And now," continued Deacon White to blushing Major Brown,
"Behold assembled the eelight and cream of Dawson Town,
And one ambition fills their hearts and makes their bosoms glow -
They want to make you, honoured sir, a bony feed Sourdough.
The same, some say, is one who's seen the Yukon ice go out,
But most profound authorities the definition doubt,
And to the genial notion of this meeting, Major Brown,
A Sourdough is a guy who drinks ... an ice-worm cocktail down."

"By Gad!" responded Major Brown, "that's ripping, don't you know.
I've always felt I'd like to be a certified Sourdough.
And though I haven't any doubt your Winter's awf'ly nice,
Mayfair, I fear, may miss me ere the break-up of your ice.
Yet (pray excuse my ignorance of matters such as these)
A cocktail I can understand - but what's an ice-worm, please?"
Said Deacon White: "It is not strange that you should fail to know,
Since ice-worms are peculiar to the Mountain of Blue Snow.
Within the Polar rim it rears, a solitary peak,
And in the smoke of early Spring (a spectacle unique)
Like flame it leaps upon the sight and thrills you through and through,
For though its cone is piercing white, its base is blazing blue.
Yet all is clear as you draw near - for coyly peering out
Are hosts and hosts of tiny worms, each indigo of snout.
And as no nourishment they find, to keep themselves alive
They masticate each other's tails, till just the Tough survive.
Yet on this stern and Spartan fare so rapidly they grow,
That some attain six inches by the melting of the snow.
Then when the tundra glows to green and nigger heads appear,
They burrow down and are not seen until another year."

"A toughish yarn," laughed Major Brown, "as well you may admit.
I'd like to see this little beast before I swallow it."
"'Tis easy done," said Deacon White, "Ho! Barman, haste and bring
Us forth some pickled ice-worms of the vintage of last Spring."
But sadly still was Barman Bill, then sighed as one bereft:
"There's been a run on cocktails, Boss; there ain't an ice-worm left.
Yet wait . . . By gosh! it seems to me that some of extra size
Were picked and put away to show the scientific guys."
Then deeply in a drawer he sought, and there he found a jar,
The which with due and proper pride he put upon the bar;
And in it, wreathed in queasy rings, or rolled into a ball,
A score of grey and greasy things were drowned in alcohol.
Their bellies were a bilious blue, their eyes a bulbous red;
Their back were grey, and gross were they, and hideous of head.
And when with gusto and a fork the barman speared one out,
It must have gone four inches from its tail-tip to its snout.
Cried Deacon White with deep delight: "Say, isn't that a beaut?"
"I think it is,

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My Colorado Thoughts

G. Eldon Smith author/bloggerI write historical mysteries set in Colorado in 1890s.

G. Eldon Smith author/blogger
I write historical mysteries set in Colorado in 1890s.