Monday, August 6, 2007

Basalt

Our camp hosts at the RV Park in Basalt seemed particularly cheerful this year. It didn’t take long for them to confide that a sale was pending. They continued cheerful for the entire month of July. Then the sale was announced in the local paper. The Aspen-Basalt Campground just sold for five point five million.

All those years Bonnie and Rich have been working so hard. I wonder if they thought they were running a campground all that time, or realized they were just babysitting land. The last remaining campground in the valley just got sold to the Aspen Ski Company, not as a campground, not as a going concern, but as land the Ski Company can bulldoze to build employee housing.

A magpie record this morning. Five of them at our feeder at the same time. And a pack of pinyon jays. For the first time, they stopped at our feeder. First one, then a dozen. Two dozen. Four dozen. That’s never happened before. It will cost us a lot of food if it continues.