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Back in May, some people proposed changing the name of
Silt, a small town west of Glenwood Springs, because a new
name would increase the value of our property.
The
town trustees wisely left it at Silt.
But the desire to use nomenclature to inflate
real-estate prices never rests, and it struck in Grand
County last week. A resident of Fraser proposed dumping its
municipal motto, Icebox of the Nation,
and replacing
it something less frigid. I think there are a lot better
amenities that highlight the area rather than 'It's
cold,'
said Kirsten Laraby, who works for a company
building high-end homes.
She talked to Joyce Burford, a town trustee who is marketing director for the local chamber of commerce, and so tomorrow night, the town board will discuss changing the motto.
Back in the 1970s, Martha and I survived four winters in
Grand County, all of which is colder than a banker's heart.
We lived in Kremmling, whose motto was Sportsman's
Paradise.
It was also known as the Banana Belt of
Middle Park
because when it was a balmy 30 below in
Kremmling, it would be 35 below in Granby (Dude Ranch
Capital of Colorado
), only 25 below in Grand Lake
(Snowmobile Capital of Colorado
), and a hard 40
below in Fraser.
Old-timers assured us of two facts. Winter nights were even colder when they were kids, and Fraser wasn't even the coldest spot in Grand County. That distinction belonged to Tabernash, a couple of miles down the road. It was a helper station in the days of steam locomotives, and giant mallets would leak steam as they waited for a train to assist up to the Moffat Tunnel. The leaking steam would instantly condense to ice when it hit cold metal, and freeze the driver wheels to the rails. Men would have to apply blow-torches in 55-below January nights before the locomotive could move.
Just how true those stories were, I never learned. And
Tabernash did not have an official weather station, so
there was no hard climatic data. But Fraser could probably
change its motto to Warmer than Tabernash
without
objections from Tabernash.
That wouldn't help sell real-estate, though. Ike
fished here
is more promising, but that was back in the
days when the Denver Water Board allowed water to flow in
Fraser-area streams. Everything else that comes to mind is
pretty generic and would fit just about any mountain area
suffering from an invasion of People of Money.
Fraser did inspire a suitable slogan for the Gunnison
Country, though. My friend and colleague Allen Best, then
living in Fraser, joined me and a daughter one February
afternoon for a cross-country ski trip over Old Monarch
Pass. We got slowed considerably by deep powder, and he
came close to losing half a dozen toes as icicles clinked
on our beards. Thus The Gunnison Country: Where people
from Fraser go to catch frostbite.
That's hardly a marketer's dream, though, and I'm having
trouble finding appropriate slogans in Colorado. Salida is
the Heart of the Rockies,
which shouldn't hurt
real-estate sales. On the other hand, it inspires obnoxious
tourist questions like If this is the Heart, where's the
Armpit?
It also leads to institutional names like
Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center,
which
is such a mouthful that people just say the
hospital.
Nearby Poncha Springs is Crossroads of the
Rockies.
That's attractive to commercial developers,
but who wants to build that dream retreat next to a busy
crossroads?
Saguache is the North Gateway Thru the Prosperous San
Luis Valley.
I once asked Dean Coombs, publisher of its
newspaper, just where this Prosperous San Luis
Valley
might be, since prosperous
hardly fits
the one we know and love. You have to go through
Crestone and become enlightened,
he explained, and
then you'll be able to visualize a prosperous San Luis
Valley.
So there's another slogan not of much use in
adding value to local property.
I figured that some Colorado town must have devised a motto which would help sell high-end real-estate. So I called the Colorado Municipal League, hoping there was a statewide list of slogans. But they don't keep one.
Besides, Colorado doesn't have a shortage of pricey
amenity-laden real-estate. It has a shortage of affordable
housing. So perhaps we should search for municipalities
with down-home price-depressing slogans like Home of the
World's Hungriest Mosquitoes,
Land of the
Double-Wides
and even the nation's icebox.
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