OPPORTUNITY

Old and new; thinking back on unexpected life companions

By Peter Butler Redstone Review

LYONS – We carry around a lot of stuff as we live our lives. But consider how few intimate items we carry with us for the whole of our lives.

You may have a favorite piece of clothing such as a nice shirt or blouse, but it is not long before the collar is frayed and it goes to the rag bin. The same with jeans, underwear, hats and coats. They all come and go. If you imagine one of those speeded up films of your own body since you were a little kid up until today, it would be a shimmering fog of different colors and styles flashing past but with your face and hands stationary.

But what else might be a constant in your self-video? The one thing that stays sharp while all the fabrics whirl past? Maybe a favorite piece of jewelry or a belt buckle. Anything else?

When I was a student, many of my friends were rock climbers. Their chosen occupation was dangerous, technical and scary for we regular folk. They didn’t have Yosemite, but they did disappear to Wales or Scotland for the weekend and come back with tales of epic cruxes (the hardest part of the crag) and the occasional neardeath experience. They had safety gear which was unfamiliar and exotic much of it without English names and referred to in the original French or German since that was what all the early Alpinists spoke. Words like abseil, karabiner and belay were part of the vernacular.

Pitons were metal spikes hammered into the rock to provide an anchor for the lifeline that your partner would feed out as you were ascending. They are frowned upon now because of the damage that they do to the crag, but the erstwhile climbers of, say, the Matterhorn in Europe would use anything that gave them some extra speed. In the Alps, just like here in the Rockies, the next dangerous thunderstorm could be only moments away.

I nagged at my friend Chris to give me a particularly pretty little piton called a rurp, the abbreviation for the “Robbins Ultimate Reality Piton.” It was a flat metal L shape about an inch and a half on each side with a nice black patina straight from some special blacksmith’s anvil. A hole in the side made it a prefect and unusual key fob.

As the years went by, the surface of my little rurp became polished by keys and pockets. So many keys and so many pockets. That little rurp has a video of its own with a blur of keys from dozens of houses, apartments, offices, cars, and post office boxes nestled in hundreds of pockets in dozens of trousers, shorts, sports gear, jackets and coats. All of them long gone and forgotten. Split rings too – they don’t last forever.

But that one little unexpected piece of metal has been my intimate companion through all those life periods. Everything else worn out and gone, even nice watches and fancy belt buckles. My wedding ring would be a candidate but my knuckles are getting a bit lumpy to wear it all the time.

If you’re still with me you are probably assuming that your skin and bones are a con-

stant through that time, even allowing for the odd sag or wrinkle here and there. But it is now known that the life span of most cells in your body is about seven years, which means that your body from 20 years ago is almost completely renewed. You are a totally different physical being. The exception are the corneas in your eyes that have a slow metabolism and last a long time. But hang on, you might dissent, I am Butler just the same as I used to be. Well almost. If you think about it, the only things you have left, absolutely original and pristine, are your memories: poems, songs, quotes, conversations, friendships and loves. Phew we’re getting a bit philosophical here. But what a treasury we carry. I have dozens of Joni Mitchell songs in my head, available for quiet moments, along with the first poem I ever learned and the sound of my Mother’s voice. My little rurp is a gleaming silver jewel now with a soft rounded patina. Fifty years of keys and pockets have been like rouge on its surface so that it has a precious glow of its own. I wonder if our most eminent columnist in these esteemed pages might have an ancient fishing reel with stories to tell and a polished surface as evidence. What is your long-term companion?

Peter Butler was born in India and lived in a house facing a giant kapok tree. Growing up in England there were trees but never quite enough. After qualifying as biochemist there was a gradual evolution into being a graphic designer. He and his wife Deirdre moved to the States in 1997 and to Lyons in 2000. Finally there are enough trees.

Mountain lions are part of Lyons’ landscape

By Greg Lowell Redstone Review

LYONS – Talk long enough to anyone who has lived in the Lyons area and you’ll likely hear a mountain lion story. Stories like the mountain lion found in a barn or the fleeting glimpse in the headlights of a big cat carrying a deer or the lion casually lying in the grass of a neighborhood park.

Mountain lions, or cougars, have been a top predator along the Front Range for thousands of years. And while they are generally unseen and elusive, the spread of humans into their range doesn’t deter them from living their normal predatory life – it only increases the chances of mountain lion-human interaction and conflict.

Generally, such interaction is more casual than threatening but there have been incidents where pets or domestic animals are killed and, while unlikely, people have been attacked. While the chance of being attacked by a mountain lion in Colorado are much less than being struck by lightning or being caught in an avalanche, it does happen. Understanding that there are lions in our area and learning how to deal with them can eliminate the chance of an attack.

Here in the Lyons area we are surrounded by thousands of acres of lion-friendly open space, notably Heil Valley Ranch and Hall Ranch. An adult mountain lion generally requires a deer kill every 10 days – a predation rate that at first seems unsustainable until you begin to notice the numbers of deer in the surrounding protected areas. This writer once counted 93 individual mule deer on a January hike in Hall Ranch. Clearly, there are enough deer to support our local lions.

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife department, which is responsible for the state’s wildlife, has no clear count on how many mountain lions there may be in Colorado but estimates that there may be anywhere from 4,500 to 5,500 lions. The difficulty in determining an exact number is because lions’ ranges vary in size from 10 to 370 square miles.

The first settlers arrived on the Front Range in the 1850s and began a systematic extermination of predators they saw as a threat to their livestock. As recently as 1964, lions were considered a varmint and there was a $50 bounty paid by the state on them. Between 1917 and 1964, bounties were collected on 1,754 mountain lions in the state, according to the Mountain Lion Foundation.

But beginning in 1965, mountain lions were recognized as a big game species and hunting seasons and annual quotas were established. Records from 2005 to 2014 show hunters legally took from 238 to 482 lions each year. In game management Unit 20, which includes Lyons and the surrounding area, an average of four lions were taken annually over the same period.

A 10-year study done several years ago was headed by CPW wildlife researcher Mat Alldredge and had a goal to shed more light on mountain-lion human interaction along the Front Range.

“The principal objective of the study was to assess mountain lion populations, their prey use, their movements and their interactions with humans,” said Alldredge. The study covers the area of the Front Range from Interstate 70 north to Lyons and south to Rte. 285. The study’s early findings provide some insights into the local mountain lions.

The study uses GPS collars on mountain lions to gather data. There were 11 lions being studied. The lions come from throughout the study area, but here locally from 2007 to 2015, 25 mountain lions were captured, collared and released (many multiple times) in the Lyons area. Nearly all the lions came from the Heil Valley Ranch and Hall Ranch open spaces. Of those 25 lions, 16 are now dead: three were road-killed,

three killed by hunters, three were shot while preying on domestic animals and the remainder died of natural or unknown causes. One lion, a two-year old male collared in January 2011 at Heil Valley Ranch, was shot by a hunter in December of that same year 250 miles away in Casper, Wyoming. The study has thus far confirmed that mule deer are the primary prey, with an occasional elk being taken. Other prey, as measured by hair samples at kill sites, includes raccoons, skunks, turkeys and occasionally domestic animals. The study at this point is inconclusive on the effectiveLowell ness of relocating problem mountain lions. Only a few lions are relocated each year because of human conflict but the success of relocation depends on finding a suitable release area that is remote enough so that the lion will not repeat the same problem. The study states that, “given that cougars currently co-

This mountain lion was one of many tagged and radio-collared for a study in the Lyons area. CPW biologist Levi Rummel took this picture early in March 2016 at Hall Ranch Open Space here in Lyons. Continue Lions on Page 14