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This time of year, it's hard to go more than 25 or 30 miles in the mountains without running into a festival. We managed it Sunday only by going to extremes -- if you're worried that Colorado is getting overcrowded, try the Ophir Creek road to the summit of the Wet Mountains, followed by the Gardner Road, whose smoothest sections are the cattle guards. In two hours, we saw only one person, a cowboy out mending fence.
But the Huerfano County Rutted Road Festival is not on any official calendar, and elsewhere in the Rockies on a weekend, if you don't run into a cinema or bluegrass festival, then you're sure to encounter a whitewater or mountain-bike festival.
This is getting worse. The local boosters just devised a
horror called the Snowbird Festival,
coming this
fall.
It seems that there's a tiny gap between End of Summer
Tourist Season (a/k/a Labor Day) and Start of Big-Game
Season. This used to be known as September.
I naively presumed that it was our reward for putting up with Colorado the rest of the year, through ticks, snowslides, mudslides, rockslides, floods, gales, lightning, hail, drought, blizzards, wash-outs, traffic jams and the other delights of the Rockies. During the nicest time of the year, we would have the mountains pretty much to ourselves.
Naturally, that sort of uneconomic primitive thinking cannot be allowed to persist in these enlightened times. There are all these motel chains and fast-food franchises with obligations to stockholders in remote capital markets, and to keep them happy, we've got to offer something special all the time.
Thus, to fill that horrible September gap when people who live here might actually get to enjoy the scenery that they get offered in lieu of living wages, the promoters racked their brains and fabricated the Snowbird Festival.
Apparently there are retired folks in land yachts who
summer in Montana and winter in Arizona; with some
promotion, these snowbirds
could be persuaded to
alter their migration routes and spend a day or two
hereabouts, to the benefit of the stockholders in Holiday
Inn and McDonald's.
Fortunately, I don't have to hold my breath for that festival, since there are so many others. You start seeing the same vendors in the tents. One Saturday their hand-crafted gee-gaws are genuine renaissance goods in keeping with the festival theme; the next week, the same goods are authentic Victorian keepsakes in keeping with the festival theme.
Even at that, we seem to be missing one good festival possibility. For instance, there are quite a few Old West festivals that celebrate the arrival of the rugged individualist pioneers in covered wagons after the federal government built the road, the federal army removed the Utes and a federal agency built the irrigation works.
But where's a New West festival to celebrate the latest transformations?
You could start the parade with a 1957 VW Microbus
blowing blue oil smoke, a peace symbol on the front, gaudy
psychedelic colors on the side, and the rear sporting a
sign that says Don't laugh. Your daughter could be in
here.
The parade, as an exhibition of cultural progress since the primitive 1965 times of burros and beater pickups, would also include lamas, llamas, $5,000 mountain bikes, $25,000 four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicles, the lone eagle drill team marching smartly with laptop computers, all staying in synch via cellular modems ...
Down in the park, a pageant would cover the big historic
moments, as they occurred in the local diner: the first
No shirt, no shoes, no service
sign; the first time
someone ordered a vegetarian meal; the night the resident
goat-ropers sheared a hippie; the first time a glass was
offered with bottled beer; the first time a waitress
brought a fork with a dessert without being asked; the
arrival of a mellow new owner and the day that sprouts
appeared on the menu; the night that wine coolers outsold
beer; the first double mocha latte ... all the way up to
the recent historic moment in the early 1990s when a smoker
was lynched by a health-conscious mob.
No festival is complete without contests, of course, that includes the New West festival. Instead of a pie-eating contest, they'll go for the tofu. Treadmills with suitable electronics will determine who sustains target pulse rates for the longest intervals. A special contest for security guards at gated subdivisions will test their ability to identify and humiliate impoverished riff-raff who might try to sneak in and reduce property values.
Naturally, there will also be booths in the park, too. Spiritual retreats will set up Genuine Native American Vision Quest Sweat Lodges, and if you haven't got 30 minutes for that, you can pick up some Instant Enlightenment Bottled Water from the Sacred Springs.
There are more possibilities for the New West festival, but the big question is which town will jump in and get it rolling. Telluride? Jackson Hole? Sedona? Crested Butte? Just let me know when and where, so I can be somewhere else that weekend.
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