Pages of the Past

From the archives of the Roaring Fork Valley Journal and The Sopris Sun

May 31, 1979

The cover of this week’s edition of The Valley Journal showed a front-on image of a horse and rider jumping over an assembly of old wooden cable spools, with the cutline declaring, “Equestriennes from throughout the area gathered at CRMS (Colorado Rocky Mountain School near Carbondale) for the annual horse show.” The annual horse show is a thing of the past, but the school continues to offer a blend of outdoor education and academic instruction to boarding and day-school students from around the valley and around the world.
In other news, the paper reported that the hopeful developers of the Crown Meadows subdivision, a planned virtual city at the base of Mount Sopris along Prince Creek Road, “may be going back to the drawing board” following negative reactions from planning officials in Carbondale and the Garfield County government.

June 1, 1989

Local businessman Terry Kirk, owner of a stone supply business and a cement manufacturer, filed a district court lawsuit against the Town of Carbondale after town official concluded that Tri-County Reddi Mix was a “batch plant,” an industrial use that did not fit into the underlying commercial zoning governing its location.
In other news, famed regional blacksmith Francis Whitaker moved his shop from its historic location in Aspen the the CRMS campus just outside Carbondale; and valley pioneer Eddis Fender died at the age of 83.

May 27, 1999

A decades-long legal fight between the Nieslanik ranching family and a few property owners in the nearby TeKeKi subdivision, who were fighting for access to their properties through the Nieslanik ranch on White Hill, led directly to approval of several development sites on the Nieslanik acreage to provide funds to pay the legal costs of the court fight. The town approved out-of-town water taps for the Nieslaniks, despite a 1995 moratorium on such water taps passed in an effort to control urban sprawl beyond the town’s borders.

May 28, 2009

The Sopris Sun reported that locals were starting to raise objections to a proposed swap of BLM lands at the base of Mt. Sopris and adjacent to the village of Marble, owned by clothing-store magnate Leslie Wexner, and a strip of federal land that separates two patches of Wexner’s Two Shoes cattle ranch off Prince Creek Road. Critics of the deal questioned the propriety of the trade.
In other news, the Carbondale Council on Arts and Humanities (now known as Carbondale Arts) held its first-ever membership drive, to add to the list of some 450 members that had grown “organically” over the years through primarily artistic and social contacts. CCAH director Ro Mead said at the time that she hoped to expand that membership list to 700 by the end of the drive.