Inching our way over the Molas Summit to Silverton
I made it.
Silverton, Colorado. Population 566. No stoplights. No dry cleaners. And no McDonald’s.
This old mining town’s official beginning came in 1874 with the discovery of gold and silver (hence the name). There are still some active mines, although today it has turned into a small tourist stop at the end of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Train Route. This historic train has been in continuous operation for 126 years, carrying passengers through the stunning vistas of mountain passes and valleys behind a vintage steam locomotive. The train runs from late Spring through the end of October.
During the summer season, when the train reaches Silverton, at an elevation of 9,300 feet, tourists get off the train for a couple of hours to shop at the tiny Western motif shops and traipse around the charming, yet dusty streets that mostly look the same as they did in the early 1900s. My mom and step-dad moved here 10 years ago and built a ten- room motel—The Canyon View Motel, that they also run themselves; they are the owners, the desk clerks, the maids, and the maintenance staff.
They also built a log cabin home about 6 miles outside of town 20 minutes down an unpaved road farther into the wilderness. Technically, they don’t even live within the city limits of Silverton. They actually are the only year-round residents of Middleton, another mostly abandoned mining town and consider themselves the mayor and the mayor’s wife.
For a slice of pure Americana garnished with a spectacular landscape, one-of-a-kind Silverton in Southwest Colorado may be the answer for an affordable yet spectacular getaway.
This small, mountain town exudes real old-west ‘movie-set’ charm with shops, restaurants, and a Victorian feel of days gone by. Silverton, where the mayor is also the milkman, is nestled high in the amazingly picturesque, San Juan Mountains. Only about five hundred residents live here year round (in summer it swells to about 2000).
Local Lyn Simon, who runs a coffee shop in town, says, “The heritage, culture, history here is untouched. It is a simple town, based on a simple quality of life, simple ways, simple needs of the people. ”
It’s a great place to visit, but can be a pretty tough place to live. The winters here are long and the landscape can be unforgiving. A four-wheel-drive truck is pretty compulsory if you want to get around. And sometimes you still can’t leave. The town sits in between two mountain passes on Highway 550 knows for its white-knuckle, switchbacks and s-curves. Even during my four-day visit, one of the passes was closed due to avalanches so you simply could not go north even if you wanted to. And between the tiny downtown and my mom’s house there are several avalanche chutes. In fact, one evening we said goodnight (I was sleeping at their motel and she was returning home) and about twenty minutes later, she returned with a big smile on her face. An avalanche had run right across the only road leading to her house coincidentally stranding her in town for the first time since she moved here more than 10 years ago. Two good things came out of this: 1. my mom and I hugged and jumped up and down like little girls excited about our ‘unexpected’ girl’s night in and, 2. she was lucky to arrive at the path of the avalanche just after it ran…not during! Eek.
This is backcountry. This is the land of avalanches. It’s man against nature…and nature is always the victor. Tragedies around these parts are not uncommon. In the last few years a local coffee shop owner starved to death while attempting a hike across the state. Another local woman shot herself inside her home. And every year several people are killed by avalanches or simply from driving right off the edge of the road and plunging hundreds of feet to their death. In many spots there are no guardrails, so when snow is plowed it can be pushed right over the cliffs. Often people skid or misjudge the treacherous hairpin turns…or they just decided they can’t deal with this podunk isolation anymore. Welcome to town!
During the winter, Silverton is famous for its anti-ski ‘resort,’ Silverton Mountain. It opened just a few years ago and is totally one-of-a-kind. While the word unique is often overused, it applies to the Silverton concept: One lift, one big mountain, no grooming, limited reservation-only skiing (for guided season), no apres-ski lodge – a real no-frills operation. You can pay almost $100 a day for a lift ticket to ski at Vail with 6,000 other skiers, or ski Silverton for as low as $39 a day with around 80 skiers or less most days. The alpine terrain is entirely for advanced and expert skiers and offers amazing, pristine backcountry conditions.
Silverton is so ‘backcountry’ and hardcore, that Olympic gold medal winner, Shaun White, spent several months here last year practicing his snowboard moves in an amazing, specially-built, top-secret half-pipe. Red Bull built the half pipe completely out of natural snow on the backside of Silverton Mountain. He rented a house in town and had a Red Bull sponsored helicopter at his disposal to drop him in the wilderness to practice his crazy boarding tricks.
Since Silverton Mountain is a tad too hardcore for me (read: way out of my league), I enjoyed a laid-back and easy day skiing at the town’s Kendall Mountain Ski Area. Also equipped with just one lift…it was perfect. There are just a few runs so if you are looking for an easy day of carefree skiing, this is it. And also perfect is the price. Lift tickets are only $15 and rentals are just $20. I enjoyed a few hours of no-pressure, no-crowds skiing for under $40. And when I got bored (as I often do) I stopped in a couple hours and still got my money’s worth.
San Juan Grill—A newer eatery with an American eclectic menu of tasty homemade organic foods
Handlebars or the Brown Bear – For some more authentic chow. Think all-American classics like chicken fried steak (is there actually any chicken in this mystery meat dish?) and stick-to-your-ribs meatloaf with gravy.
Drink:
Mobius Café – a big, airy, loft-like brick and timber café with great coffee, free wifi and a well-worn leather couch where you can take a load off and chat with some locals.
Silverton Brewery – the local brewery with microbrews, bar food, and the classic circulating electric train.
Montanya Distillery – a new addition to town, this unique Rum Distillery is Colorado’s first all-rum distillery and, at 9,300 feet, the highest distillery of any kind in the country. Of course at this altitude, one mojito is all your need.
Shop:
Of course, there are the requisite western motif local souvenir shops…but for something different and locally made try:
Canyon View Motel—Family owned (my family!) motel with a western façade and free treats for four-legged guests.
Eureka Lodge—looking to really get ‘out there’, then stay at the Eureka Lodge.
Major airline carriers fly into Montrose Airport, one hour north and Durango Airport, one hour south of Silverton. Of course, if the passes are closed, then you will be staying in those cities anyway.
I was overdue for a visit to see my mom. I can’t believe it had already been nearly a year since my last visit. Time flies. After I returned from my world travels last spring, I flew over to see her…and now it had been a year since I returned the US and that I found even harder to believe. Over the last year, I’d done some domestic traveling to New England and Los Angeles and spent the summer in Chicago. But it was a far cry from my recent globetrotting. I got caught up in some ‘stuff’ back home that made me more stationary than I thought it would.
So I jetted out west to go from one place covered in snow (New Jersey) where it seems most people complain about the weather to another place knee-deep with snow drifts, where the people relish the powder and just go about their day as usual. But since it was snowing up here at these high altitudes, what it did mean for me was that my mom was not able to drive over the mountain pass in order to pick me up and bring me back to Silverton. So, I had a brief reminder/encounter with that independent traveler-girl I once knew just a year ago. I called from the airport and booked myself into a hotel in downtown Durango and took the hotel’s free shuttle into town. It was nice to be alone again…not answering to anyone, not needing anyone’s help (or people thinking they need to help me) and just making my own decisions, right or wrong, with only myself to reconcile with. I settled in to what I thought would be a boring Best Western. To my surprise, my room key let me into a bright room complete with a big, cushy, king size bed, a couch/sitting area, fridge, microwave, and a lovely private balcony overlooking trees and snowdrifts. Plus the middle of the hotel had a wood-beamed atrium with a heated pool and hot tub. Nice. Too bad I didn’t even think of bringing my swim suit in February.
I set out to have a wander and breathe in some of the fresh mountain air. I needed this after the four-hour flight from New Jersey plus the three hour layover in Denver. It was never easy getting here…and proving even harder since I wasn’t actually at my destination yet. It was often easier for me to fly abroad than to get to my mom’s little hamlet in the mountains of Colorado.
I walked up and down the charming and lively streets of Durango full of open shops, pubs, and cafes. It’s ski season so the town is alive with folks on vacation enjoying a lot of outdoor winter activities. It has a nice main street lined with old brick buildings with that old west charm.
I settled on a sushi bar and was greeted by the loud “Irashai Mase” from the chefs behind the counter. Perfect for the solo diner. I chowed on some seaweed and noodle soup, sashimi, and a ‘samurai’ roll. Pretty tasty for being in the landlocked Rocky Mountains.
Hopefully tomorrow the roads will be clear and I will actually be able to get to see my mom. It is disconcerting to come all this way and just be an hour away, but possibly not be able to cross that final stretch.
Vancouver. Vancouver. Vancouver. Why is that one of the words that once you say it a few times…it starts to sound really weird? Van-COO-ver.
Okay, so what I am going to write about Vancouver? About the Olympic Games happening there right now? About my wonderful trip there? Nah. You may recall I haven’t been yet as it is on my ‘where next’ list. But since it is so much in the news right now, I figured I’d take this opportunity to get to know the city a little bit more. Researching and learning about any new place always gets me excited to visit and I am hoping to get up there this summer.
Quick Overview:
This Canadian city in the Pacific Northwest routinely tops the Economist’s survey as the “World’s Most Liveable City.” Each city is given points for these top factors:
Stability
Health care
Culture and environment
Education
Infrastructure
Vancouver is a young, vibrant urban center surrounded on three sides by water. You can go to the beach or ski on the same day as it is surrounded by amazing nature and the natural beauty of the sea and the mountains. Some reasons to go:
Stanley Park: The views, the activities, and the natural wilderness beauty here are quintessential Vancouver. One of the largest urban parks in the world, Stanley Park is nothing short of magnificent. Wander through the forest, along Burrard Inlet, past cricket fields, rose gardens, and the park’s superlative collection of First Nations totem poles.
The Neighborhoods: Yaletown was the former meatpacking and warehouse district and is now one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Vancouver. It has been converted to an area of apartment lofts, nightclubs, restaurants, and boutique shops. The West End is chock full of great cafes, good nightclubs, varied bookshops, and some of the city’s best restaurants. That’s part of what makes it such a sought-after address, but it’s also the little things, like the big, stately tree-lined streets, the mix of high-rise condos and sturdy old Edwardians, and the way that, in the middle of such an urban setting, you now and again stumble on a view of the ocean or the mountains. Shaughnessy is a great place to drive or bike, especially in the spring when trees and gardens are blossoming. Designed in the 1920s as an enclave for Vancouver’s budding elite, this is the hoity-toity address to have. It’s worth a look even if only to see the stately homes and monstrous mansions, many of which are now featured in film shoots or rented by Hollywood movie stars while they’re in town filming. Besides touristy Chinatown, Richmond is something to experience. Twenty years ago, this area was mostly farmland with a bit of sleepy suburb. Now it’s ‘Asia West,’ an agglomeration of shopping malls geared to the new (read: rich, educated, and successful) Chinese immigrant. It’s like getting into your car in Vancouver and getting out in Hong Kong.
Granville Island: Locals and visitors love the mini-ferry ride across False Creek to the Granville Island Public Market where you can shop for delicious lunch fixings; it’s brimming with farmers, butchers and fishmongers.
Kitsilano beaches: Follow the coastline road to the University of British Columbia and you’ll travel past a magnificent array of beaches, from grass-edged shores to windswept stretches of sand, to cliff-side coves so private that clothing is optional.
Kayaking into Indian Arm: Vancouver is one of the few cities on the edge of a great wilderness, and one of the best ways to appreciate its splendor is by kayaking on the gorgeous Indian Arm. Barely 30 minutes from downtown, the fjordic landscape is stunning.
Crossing the Capilano Suspension Bridge: Stretched across a deep forested canyon, high above trees and a rushing river, this pedestrian-only suspension bridge has been daring visitors to look down for more than 100 years. Now you can explore the giant trees, too, on a series of artfully constructed treewalks.
Urban sprawl is kept in check naturally thanks to the city’s geography of surrounding mountains and waters. So neighborhoods overlap and apartments rise. That seems to heighten the city’s international mix, and not just when the Olympic Games are in town.
I was recently nominated by the Trip Base Travel Blog to possibly be a part of their E-book on best kept travel secrets.
They are compiling this amazing list from travelers near and far of great travel tips, lesser known destinations, and hidden gem restaurants or hotels. Of course, as with any list like this, any ‘gem’ will no longer be so secret. But, alas, that is the way of today’s information age, I suppose.
So here goes. Here are three of my best kept travel secrets…soon to be not so secret anymore. You can also see more of my own tips here and soon here on my ‘Ever-Expanding Tips’ page.
1. Destination: Bozcaada Island, Turkey (pronounced: bose-jah-dah)
This tiny island off the west coast of Turkey is one of only two inhabited Turkish islands in the Aegean amidst a sea of Greek Isles. It is a dry, yellow-hued scrubby little island with picturesque wine vineyards blanketing its sunny slopes. It has a charming cobblestoned main village that is filled with mostly locals and thankfully really isn’t a big stop on the tourist trail. The main industries are fishing, tourism, and wine production. The population is mostly Turkish but there are still about 30 ethnic Greeks living here.
It’s a great escape from Istanbul and just ‘off the beaten path’ enough to be an island of mostly vacationing locals and not the hordes of tourists going to the other islands in the Aegean Sea. Gorgeous blue waters, tasty local fare & wine, and lots of sun. Ah, the simple life.
2. Travel Tip: Most Credit Cards (including highly publicized ‘travel’ card, American Express) charge you a fee if you charge something in a different currency. I use Capitol One which (at the time of this writing) does NOT charge a fee or percentage. What’s in your wallet?!
3. Great, off-the-beaten-path Hotel: Inn-Berlin
This small hotel in hip Berlin is shiny, bright, modern, and spotless, and its owners, Ralph and Yvonne, are extremely friendly and helpful.
The rooms are bright and clean, and all have fluffy down comforters encased in colorful duvets. The style is Ikea-minimal with clean lines. Rooms have cool and whimsical murals on their walls, and most importantly, they all come with their very own good-luck gnomes!
The Inn-Berlin is located a bit north of central Berlin, but the trip to most of the city’s main districts can be made in just fifteen minutes on either the U-Bahn or S-Bahn.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians who fled their earthquake-rocked capital are now returning to the rubble and refugee camps, complicating the hopeful plans to build a better Haiti. As you most likely know, the catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake wreaked havoc on this tiny nation ultimately killing approximately 200,000 people and injuring another estimated 300,000.
Devastated Port-au-Prince is home to one third of the country’s 9 million people. Haitians and International officials had hoped to take this opportunity to somehow rebuild this city of ramshackle homes and slums. But the government is largely powerless to keep people from returning. Haiti is the poorest nation in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Hope to Rebuild
A researcher from the University of Manchester’s Global Urban Research Centre, said planners must assume people will return and they must work closely with them in order to rebuild. Instead of thinking people are in the way, planners should think of it as an opportunity to bring people together to fix, not just the bricks and mortar, but the underlying social fabric of Haiti as well.
Tourism
Before the devastating quake, Haiti was just starting to capitalize on its location and weather to bring in the tourism dollars that nearly all of its neighbors have been enjoying for decades.
New hotels, new attention from international investors, and buzz among travelers who have visited in recent years seemed to signal a renewed interest in Haiti as a destination.
Just a few months ago, Choice Hotels International announced plans for two new hotels in Haiti, making it the first global hotel brand to open an operation on the island. Both hotels are to be located in Haiti’s historic township of Jacmel. And since the earthquake they have reiterated their commitment to Haiti as well as sending supplies and donations.
Other plans include the construction of a road linking Labadee and Haiti’s UNESCOWorld Heritage Site, a park containing the Citadelle Laferriere fortress and the Sans Souci palace built by Henri Christophe, a leader of the slave revolt that freed Haiti from French rule in 1804.
The mystique of its voodoo culture and sandy beaches made Haiti one of the gems of the Caribbean. Club Med once operated a beach resort here. But successive years of political violence decimated the tourism economy. Grinding poverty has also discouraged tourism. Some 70 percent of Haiti’s 9 million people live on less than $2 a day.
“[Haiti] really is just lovely, and it’s a tragedy that they haven’t been able to leverage that natural beauty into a tourism industry because it definitely deserves it,” said Pauline Frommer, creator of Pauline Frommer’s guidebooks, who visited the country during a cruise last fall.
Haiti’s neighbors in the Caribbean include vacation hot spots like Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Puerto Rico. But no glossy brochures tout Haiti’s beaches.
Instead, travelers had stayed away thanks to the images of political unrest, repressive regimes, poverty, and constant civil clashes seen on the news.
Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic — Haiti’s more stable neighbor on the island of Hispaniola — began planning and investing in its tourism industry in the 1970s. According to the Caribbean Tourism Organization, almost 4 million people visited the Dominican Republic in 2008.
President Clinton, who was named a United Nations special envoy to Haiti last spring, visited the country in October to promote local tourism and told investors it was the right time to make Haiti “an alluring tourist destination.”
Last year, Haiti also struck a deal with Venezuela to build a second international airport in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city, Reuters reported.
Lonely Planet has even called Haiti one of the most exciting countries in the world in which to travel.
Right now, the biggest boon to Haiti’s tourism has been the Royal Caribbean Cruise Ship that stops at Labadee peninsula, about 100 miles from Port-au-Prince, for the day. Of Haiti’s 800,000 visitors last year, 500,000 were ferried in by Royal Caribbean.
The company has spent $50 million developing the area, making it Haiti’s biggest foreign direct investor, said Adam Goldstein, president and CEO of Royal Caribbean International, in an interview with NPR.
But critics say Labadee has little to do with local culture. Some people may not even be aware they are in Haiti when they visit what the cruise line touts as “Royal Caribbean’s private paradise,” an enclosed beach area surrounded by a high fence.
Give Help
The American Red Cross is one of the most widely known organizations working in Haiti. They accept online donations, help volunteers arrange to give time or other support, and can accept $10 donations, charged to your cell phone bill, by texting HAITI to 90999.
UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders, two other groups showing up frequently in calls for help, have set up sites for their Haiti efforts.
Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean has harnessed Twitter to gather support for his Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund, which also offers $5 text message donations.
I personally donated to Doctors without Borders a few weeks ago. If you have done something to help, please tell us about it in the comments. Hopefully, all the outpouring of support from citizens around the world will make a difference and someday we will be enjoying the culture, music, food, and beaches of beautiful Haiti.
Recently my step-sis, Beth, and I were doing what a lot of people in New Jersey spend a lot of time doing: driving. It was late one night and we were returning from dinner and heading north on the infamous New Jersey Turnpike. We were near Newark, New Jersey’s largest city and a bastion for industry. You’d think growing up in New Jersey as I did, I would have visited here, but nope. It really wasn’t a destination for several reasons…it wasn’t known to be very safe, I didn’t really have my driver’s license until my last year in New Jersey (before I left the state for university) and the fact that New York City is just 8 miles east…so why mess around in Newark?
As we sped passed a large power plant of some kind, all lit up against the night sky, I began to wonder what was really going on there. I caught the name and in modern technology fashion, Beth proceeded to punch it in to Google on her Blackberry and away we went into the world of interesting facts and knowledge (well, for us at least).
According to Wikipedia and various other websites, the gas-fired (natural gas and butane), 940-megawatt Linden Cogeneration Plant was built in 1992. It is owned by El Paso Energy (the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline operator, with more than 43,000 miles of pipe in service) and operated by G.E. Energy Services.
The way in which the facility generates power is intriguing. It burns natural gas, which while not entirely clean is certainly better than a few other sources. But it takes the process one step further.
It uses the heat generated by its five gas turbine generators to pressurize heat recovery steam generators—hence “cogeneration.” The plant is making sure to harness every drop of energy it creates, even heat.
Apparently a percentage of the power produced by the facility is sold into the New York City market in the form of steam.
From a small dry cleaner on Manhattan’s East Side to Rockefeller Center to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the United Nations, along with some 2,000 other customers and 100,000 buildings, from residential low-rises to commercial skyscrapers, the City of New York is one of the largest consumers of steam. The Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter in lower Manhattan began using steam to warm its sanctuary in 1882, the year the first steam generation plant went into operation in New York. The church has used steam ever since.
Some 30 billion pounds of steam every year flow beneath the streets of Manhattan from the Battery to 96th Street. While it is unknown to most New Yorkers (even though years ago David Letterman talked of the ‘radioactive steam’ wafting up from the city streets), Con Edison’s subterranean steam system is the biggest steam district in the world boasting an annual steam production more than double that of Paris, Europe’s largest system.
The New York City steam system carries steam from central power stations under the streets of Manhattan to heat, cool, or supply power to high rise buildings and businesses. Cogeneration significantly increases the efficiency of fuel usage and thereby reduces the emission of pollutants and particulate matter and reduces the city’s carbon footprint.
So now I know this super steam system is the reason for the steaming manholes we see all over Manhattan. We did learn this is usually caused by external water being boiled because it came in contact with the freakin’ hot steam pipes, rather than leaks in the steam system itself.
A bit of history:
By the early 1900s, regulations emerged across the U.S. to promote rural electrification through the construction of centralized plants managed by regional utilities. These regulations not only promoted electrification throughout the countryside, but they also discouraged decentralized power generation, such as cogeneration. By 1978, Congress recognized that efficiency at central power plants had stagnated and sought to encourage improved efficiency with the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), which encouraged utilities to buy power from other energy producers.
Cogeneration plants proliferated, soon producing about 8 percent of all energy in the U.S. However, the bill left implementation and enforcement up to individual states, resulting in little or nothing being done in many parts of the country.
In 2008, Tom Casten, chairman of Recycled Energy Development, said, “We think we could make about 19 to 20 percent of U.S. electricity with heat that is currently thrown away by industry.”
Cogeneration, also called combined heat and power (CHP), is, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “an efficient, clean, and reliable approach to generating electricity and heat energy from a single fuel source.” Combined heat and power can greatly increase a facility’s operational efficiency and decrease energy costs. And it is said that CHP reduces the emission of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global climate change.
Outside the U.S., energy recycling is more common. Denmark is probably the most active energy recycler, obtaining about 55% of its energy from cogeneration and waste heat recovery. Other large countries, including Germany, Russia, and India, also obtain a much higher share of their energy from decentralized sources.
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