Will Grandbois

Colorado Mountain College is celebrating 50 years of operation this year, and while Uncle Jimmy’s Pig Roast and Carnival at the Spring Valley Campus on April 28 is certainly a local celebration, there are plenty of stories even closer to home.
For Debra Burleigh, who worked for CMC in Carbondale for most of the ‘90s and served as the location director on several occasions, the defining moment was in January 1995, when Ginny Lappala paid her a visit. Ginny and her late husband Paul were familiar faces at the school, and Ginny recently read an article about how the school was struggling to secure space as its numerous leases began to expire. She had spoken with her heirs and had decided to offer CMC half a block of property across the alley from their old house downtown.

The Dandelion Market in downtown Carbondale has been in financial trouble for some time, and following last week’s layoff of its general manager, Katrina Byars, may soon close or be transformed into a different kind of operation, representatives of the organization said this week.
But Byars and others remain determined to find ways to maintain some kind of outlet for locally generated produce, meats and processed foods that she said offers an alternative to the products sold at the Whole Foods Market in Willits.

Carbondale Town Manager Jay Harrington this week informed the Town of Vail that he was pulling himself out of the running to become the new town manager there.
Referring to a phone call to the recruitment firm acting on Vail’s behalf, Harrington told The Sopris Sun, “I told him that, even if offered the job, I would not be accepting it.”
He said that family considerations played the biggest role in his decision, and that “there comes a time when money is not the main consideration” in whether to switch jobs, a reference to the fact that the Vail job carries a considerably higher salary than his current position, and comes with housing.

April 28, 1977: An ad hoc group called the Redstone Hot Springs Foundation scheduled a meeting at the Crystal Theatre to determine what, “if anything,” should be done with the Penny Hot Springs between Carbondale and Redstone. Locals, including Crystal River Valley resident Roy Rickus, created the foundation after an upstream property owner “buried” the mineral hot springs, located alongside Highway 133.

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) would have gotten an earful on April 21 in Glenwood Springs, had he stopped to chat with protesters outside the Hotel Colorado demanding that he hold Town Hall meetings with constituents rather than restricting himself to private fundraising gatherings with supporters.
The senator was in town as a guest at a Garfield County Republican Party dinner, meant to raise money for local party candidates.
Gardner, who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2015, has not held a Town Hall meeting for constituents during the most recent Congressional recess, which ran from April 10-21, or apparently during previous 2017 recess sessions, according to his critics and his website.

Get your kids hooked on theater early with “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse,” part of Thunder River Theatre Company’s ongoing effort to engage new audiences.
Based on the beloved children’s book series, directed by Wendy Moore and starring Jennetta Howell as the titular character, it runs April 29-30 at 4 p.m. and May 13-14 at both 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. and is perfect for youngsters ages five to 10 and their families.
It’s a refreshing challenge for Moore to dabble in theatre for children — albeit with adult actors.
“The principals are the same,” she noted. “I try to make children’s theater as real as adult theater.”

Look for some changes at Roaring Fork High School after athletic director Marty Nieslanik hired Carbondale Middle School teacher/coach Matthew Phelan as its new football head coach last week.
For one thing, Phelan told The Sopris Sun he is going to recruit soccer players to also play on the football team.

Jackie Chenoweth is what one might call an industrial-hemp enthusiast; someone who, with a silent partner, has been working for about four years through their organization, the Colorado Hemp Education Association (www.coloradohemped.org), to bring about what she sees as a necessary change in laws governing hemp at the state and federal level. The Carbondale-area resident firmly believes the plant, a non-psychoactive member of the cannabis family of plants — meaning one cannot get “high” on hemp — can change the world for the better if only people can learn that hemp is not the same thing as “pot” and that hemp has more than 25,000 known uses that have nothing to do with altering one’s consciousness.