The Pole

Early in the morning of Feb. 6, local chef Seanan Culloty narrowly escaped an apartment fire with his life and his faithful dog, Bubba. However, Culloty, the head chef at Manna, escaped with little else. To help Culloty get back on his feet, friends and co-workers are hosting a GuFundMe page. The money will be used to help Culloty replace his belonging as well as with a deposit and first month’s rent on a new apartment.

Adding to an already grim year of statistics, last week was the deadliest week of avalanches in the U.S. in more than a century. At least 15 people were killed in avalanches in six states between Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, including three in the San Juans alone.

To help folks better contend with this season’s treacherous and unprecedented conditions, Friends of the San Juans wants to equip them the best tool possible: knowledge.

It’s about to get a whole lot easier to juice electric vehicles. This week, the City of Durango pledged $10,997 to help finance the city’s first-ever electric vehicle DC fast-charging station. The DC station, which will be located in the Durango Transit Center parking, will allow up to two vehicles to fully charge simultaneously, in approximately 20 minutes. The new stations will be located next to the City’s existing Level 2 EV charging stations, which by comparison take roughly four hours to deliver a full charge.

In case you’ve forgotten amid the onslaught of news over the last several months, our Four Corners neighbor to the southwest turned blue this year for the first time since 1996. This monumental achievement, no pun intended, was accomplished with the help of countless foot soldiers getting out the vote on the Navajo Nation. The charge was led by the Rural Utah Project, which drove an impressive 66,274 miles across the expansive reservation last year, registering some 5,875 voters in Arizona and Utah.

Next time you’re shaking in your ski boots about to drop a big line, consider this. Last week, a guy named Chuck Patterson dropped a 40-foot face of raging ocean at Northern California’s infamous Maverick’s surf break. On a pair of skis (he had poles, too).

The Sundance Kid is riding off into the sunset. Last month, Robert Redford announced he is selling his Sundance resort, north of Provo, Utah. The resort, which Redford founded more than 50 years ago, is being bought by real estate investment firms Broadreach Capital Partners and Cedar Capital Partners.

Something as simple as a 50-cent scratch-and-sniff could hold the keys to stemming the spread of the coronavirus at a fraction of the cost and time of high-tech tests, new CU Boulder research suggests.