The Colorado Mountain Companion: A Potpourri of Useful Miscellany from the Highest Parts of the Highest State

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Overview

A treasure trove of useful (and just plain fun) information about Colorado’s mountain country. A handy-dandy, comprehensive, wide-ranging reference guide to settling (good-naturedly) any arguments about Colorado’s high country. We’re not just talking about population figures, elevation stats, or lists of Fourteeners and rivers, although these are included. You will learn far more including mountain lexicons (so that you’ll know what a gutter bunny, potato chip, and prune really mean), Colorado as a movie set, ...

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The Colorado Mountain Companion: A Potpourri of Useful Miscellany from the Highest Parts of the Highest State

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More About This Book

Overview

A treasure trove of useful (and just plain fun) information about Colorado’s mountain country. A handy-dandy, comprehensive, wide-ranging reference guide to settling (good-naturedly) any arguments about Colorado’s high country. We’re not just talking about population figures, elevation stats, or lists of Fourteeners and rivers, although these are included. You will learn far more including mountain lexicons (so that you’ll know what a gutter bunny, potato chip, and prune really mean), Colorado as a movie set, Colorado songs, skiing, fishing, avalanches, geology, historic districts, hiking and biking, snakes, Superfund sites, strange festivals, weather miserability index, and much more.

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What People Are Saying

From the Publisher

With his signature wit and inimitable style, Fayhee lays out a wealth of information about Colorado in this wonderfully readable pocket guide…an essential text for those who’d like to dig a little deeper into what it means to be a Coloradan—and what our state is all about.

                                      —Alex Miller, managing editor, Summit Daily News

Herein you’ll find everything you always wanted to know about Colorado, but were afraid to ask. …The Colorado Mountain Companion is an essential accompaniment to your own wayward and wonderful Colorado wanderings.

—Ken Wright, author, The Monkey Wrench Dad, Why I’m Against It All, and A Wilder Life

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780871089601
  • Publisher: Pruett Publishing Company
  • Publication date: 9/15/2012
  • Series: The Pruett Series
  • Pages: 350
  • Sales rank: 367,168
  • Product dimensions: 5.66 (w) x 8.32 (h) x 0.71 (d)

Meet the Author

M. John Fayhee is the editor of the Mountain Gazette. A one-time contributing editor at Backpacker magazine, Fayhee's work has also appeared in Forbes-Life Mountain-Time, High Country News, Aspen Sojourner Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Men's Fitness, New Mexico Magazine, America West Airlines Magazine, Horizon Air, and many other local, regional, and national magazines and newspapers. He is the author of many books, including Along the Colorado Trail, A Colorado Winter, and Bottoms Up. Fayhee has also hiked the Colorado Trail and the Colorado section of the Continental Divide Trail.

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Read an Excerpt

Mountain License Plates

“Forever and ever, you could eyeball a Colorado automobile license plate and discern from whence that vehicle hailed. From 1959 to 1982, the Colorado Department of Revenue, which includes the Division of Motor Vehicles (which, in turn, supervises all matters related to license plates), issued what were known as the “2/4 plates.” These plates basically started with two county-specific letters, followed by a series of numbers that could be anywhere from one digit to four. There was some crossover in the latter years of the 2/4-plate program when plate numbering started running out. However, for the most part, that overlap was found in the more populated counties of the Front Range. In the early 1980s, the Department of Corrections, which oversees the actual manufacture of license plates in Colorado (yes, the prisoners-making-license-plates stereotype is accurate), came to the conclusion that, because of increases in the state’s population and the resultant increased number of registered vehicles, it would have to scrap the 2/4 system, a decision that caused a surprising amount of ire, especially in the more chauvinistic rural counties in Colorado. The change resulted in a non-county-specific system with license plates generally containing three letters, followed by three numbers. The new system sometimes seems like it is county specific. County clerks, who issue license plates on the local level, may order, say, 500 plates at a time. These plates will likely appear in sequence (e.g., WRF-000, WRF-001, etc.). But a county on the complete other side of the state might get the next 500 in the WRF sequence. The Division of Motor Vehicles did resurrect county-specific plates from 1989 to 1992, when it offered its “denim plates.” These plates were blue and actually had the name of the county in which the vehicle was registered written on the bottom. The plates proved far less popular than the green-on-white or white-on-green mountain background plates, and so the denim-plate program was scrapped. The state does allow for 2/4 plates issued before July 1, 2003, to remain legal. Thus, it is still possible to see license plates in the Colorado high country that read: ZB-14 or ZA-2. Whenever you see someone whose ride sports such plates, best not to get into an argument with that person about who has lived in the county the longest.”     From page 51-52, The Colorado Mountain Companion

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Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Introduction

7 The “Icebox of the Nation” Designation Not So Simple

13 Why Are Gunnison and Alamosa So Cold?

13 Windchill and the Weather Miserability Index

17 How Are Sunny Days Measured?

18 Non-Possessive Place Names

19 A Sense of Scale

20 Just Exactly How Big Is Colorado?

24 Colorado Mountain Lexicon

32 How Colorado’s Mountain Towns Got Their Names

42 Highest Towns a Matter of Perspective

47 Establishing Colorado’s Lowest Point

48 States Whose Highest Points Are Lower Than

     Colorado’s Lowest Point

49 How Does Colorado Compare?

51 Mountain License Plates

53 Mountain Area Codes

56 Avalanches in Colorado

60 Impotence Drugs Reach New Peaks

61 Colorado Lakes and Reservoirs

66 Lakes and Ice

67 Safe Ice Thickness and Cold-Water Hypothermia

70 Lightning: The Fearsome Flash from Above

73 Monsoon Season

75 Cloud Seeding

80 Just How Much Water Is That?

83 Global Relations

84 “America the Beautiful”: Colorado’s Most Famous Musical Summit

87 Bates Not the Only Famous Person to Summit Pikes Peak

88 Rocky Mountain High

90 “Where the Columbines Grow”—The State Song That No One Knows

91 Colorado Songs

97 Colorado As a Movie Set

105 The Great Demonymic Debate: Coloradans or Coloradoans?

109 Colorado Olympic Athletes

123 Colorado: King of the Ski Industry

126 Colorado’s Early Ski History: Highlights

137 Mountainspeak: Skiing Lexicon

145 The Naming of Colorado’s Ski Runs

148 Colorado’s “Lost” Ski Areas

153 The Colorado Ski Safety Act

155 Words for Snow—Eskimo and Colorado

159 “Texas” Ski Areas

160 Mountainspeak: Cross-Country Skiing Lexicon

163 Mountainspeak: Snowboarding Lexicon

165 Most Common Mountain Recreational Injuries

166 High Country Emergency Room Admission Statistics

167 Colorado Mountain Pathogens

169 Native Americans in Colorado

175 Colorado Geology: The Laramide Orogeny

176 Colorado Geology: The Rio Grande Rift Valley

178 Colorado Geology: The Aspen Anomaly

179 Colorado Geology: Colorado’s Highest-Ever Mountains

180 The Naming of Geographic Features

186 Gorges Versus Canyons

189 The Fourteeners

192 Colorado Fourteener Records

195 Peak Prominence and Isolation

198 The Most Dangerous Fourteeners

203 Mountainspeak: Climbing Lexicon

207 The 3,000-Foot “Rule”

209 Colorado’s Steepest Points

210 The Peaks of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech

211 Headwaters Hill and Colorado’s Closed Basins

214 The Naming of Challenger Point

216 Some Noteworthy Colorado Uphills

216 Colorado’s Long Hiking Trails and the National Scenic Trails

219 Mountainspeak: Hiking and Backpacking Lexicon

227 Mountainspeak: Mountain Biking Lexicon

228 Public and/or Protected Land in Colorado

230 Colorado’s Wilderness

238 Colorado: Birthplace of Major Rivers

242 Mountainspeak: Fishing Lexicon

244 Colorado’s Endangered Rivers

247 Wild and Scenic Rivers

252 Colorado’s Highest Roads

253 Mountainspeak: Road Biking Lexicon

257 Colorado Wildfires

261 Other Large Wildfires in Western North America

263 All Firewood Is Not Created Equal

265 Endangered and Threatened Species in the Colorado Mountains

273 Colorado Mountain Birds

277 Fatal Bear and Mountain Lion Attacks in Colorado

278 High Country Snakes

280 The Colorado State Flower: What Exactly Is It?

281 The Colorado State Quarter

284 Superfund Sites

290 Strange Colorado Festivals

301 Aspen: The Brand-Name King

302 Smoking Bans: It All Started in Colorado’s Mountain Country

303 Colorado’s Mountain Historic Districts

310 Legalized Gambling in Colorado

312 Mountain Counties Most Often Vote Blue

318 Changing Your Name

322 Home Away from Home (Extradition)

325 Listing Colorado

331 Index

341 About the Author

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