Blogorama: Hot dogs, tulips and right-wing rants

Posted on April 2, 2010 by Bob Berwyn

Redesigning the great American tubesteak ...

Redesigning the hot dog, right wing rants and so much more …

Bear blog
SUMMIT COUNTY — We begin this week’s perambulation through the blogosphere by pitching our own Bear Blog, part of the regular news feed on Summit Voice. As part of our efforts to maintain friendly relations between Summit County’s human residents and their furred and feathered neighbors, we’ve partnered with the Colorado Division of Wildlife to promote the Bear Aware campaign. In the bear blog, we scan headlines and science reports to bring you the latest ursine news from around the world. We’re hoping for a few guest blogs from notables like Smokey, or Yogi, but we’ll see if they respond to our request. Click here to check it out.

Grand Traverse
For some in-depth coverage of the Grand Traverse, we turn to Colorado Mountain Journal, which featured an up-close interview with Bryan Wickenhauser, a member of the winning team. Wickenhauser and his partner, Brian Smith, won the race, which usually traverse the Elk Mountains from Crested Butte to Aspen. But a powerful spring storm forced a last-minute route change, leading to some confusion. Read the Colorado MoJo interview with Wickenhauser here.

The Petal and Bean offers flower arrangements and much more.

Tulip time!
If you’re feeling that tingling spring sensation, swing by the Petal and Bean blog, where the latest post features some outstanding tulip photography, including shots from the Denver Botanic Garden, where spring apparently has already sprung. Checking this out inspired us to search for some other tulip blogs, not knowing what we would find. but lo and behold, here’s a link to the Keukenhof Gardens, Ground Zero for tulips as far as we can tell. And then this blog, with some cool aerial shots of tulip fields in Holland. More blogs after the break … (more…)

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Blog-o-rama: From Kabul to Salt Lake City

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Bob Berwyn

Our weekly blog roundup includes local bloggers and news of note from around the planet.

Beacon reviews, news from Kabul and U2 in Salt Lake City

Compiled by Bob Berwyn

SUMMIT COUNTY — This week’s blog-o-rama starts in Andorra, where Lou Dawson’s Wild Snow blog has posted a detailed report from the 2010 ski mountaineering world championships, where Team USA placed ninth in the team rankings as the only non-European team to crack the top ten.

A pair of Summit County skiers led the way, as reported previously in this Summit Voice story.

The uphill-downhill races across rugged Alpine terrain have grown wildly popular in Europe and are starting to catch on in the U.S. The upcoming Five Peaks contest in Breckenridge should help throw a spotlight on the discipline.

For an overview of the of the different types of races and the courses at the world championships in Andorra, click here.

New avalanche beacon
Staying with the backcountry skiing theme, we want to point you toward Colorado Mountain Journal, where Rob Coppolillo posted a detailed review of the Backcountry Access Tracker2 beacon.

The Tracker2 features three antennas, which helps pinpoint a buried beacon, especially in a deep burial, making a potential rescue that much quicker. Copolillo says the Tracker2 is the fastest beacon he’s used and claims that it doesn’t freeze up while processing data. Read the full review here.

From Colorado to Afghanistan
We’ve also been following The Long Way Around, by Breckenridge, Colorado resident Shannon Galpin, who is blogging from Afghanistan. In her latest post, Galpin reports on the recent appearance of graffiti in the streets of Kabul. Specifially, Galpin writes that stenciled drawings of dollar sign, poppies, helicopters, a Talib, and the phrase “Cost of War” are being juxtaposed across wall-scapes to send a message about the cost of war.

Galpin also blogs at Mountain to Mountain, an organization she founded to create educational opportunities in remote and poor parts of the world by building connections between mountain communities around the world. In her most recent post, Galpin writes about the work she is doing with street children in Afghanistan.

You can also follow Galpin on Twitter to get updates from her blogs.

San Francisco to Silverton

We also found a cool blog post from some San Francisco-area folks who shared some images and perceptions of a snowboarding trip to Silverton Mountain. It’s alway interesting to see how visitors from the outside perceive our mountain towns.

We recently added the Petal and Bean to our blogroll and found this entertaining post about creating an avalanche-themed wedding. Suggestions include stopping in for an Avs game in Denver, taking an avalanche awareness class with Babes in the Backcountry, renting gear from Avalanche Sports and enjoying a pint of Avalanche Ake at the Breckenridge Brewery. Fun stuff!

In another local blog, Mingling with Words, Tara Kusumoto posted some great information about the Paralympics, starting this weekend in Vancouver. It looks like Kusumoto’s Twitter stream is also featuring up-to-date information on the Paralympics.

In Jackson Hole, JH Underground blogger Jim Stanford posted a story about U2′s upcoming concert in Salt Lake City. The Irish rockers are kicking off a world tour June 3 at the Rice-Eccles Stadium at the University of Utah, with Lenny Kravitz opening. According to Stanford, there are still plenty of tickets left.

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This week, an Olympian blog-o-rama

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Bob Berwyn

An Olympic blog-o-rama ...

We’ve got links to Olympic bloggers, tweets and more

Compiled by Bob Berwyn


Athlete blogging limited

In honor of the 2010 Winter Olympics, this week’s blog-o-rama is focusing on a some of the blogging news from Vancouver, starting with the fact that, if you’re an Olympic athlete, you’re not just free to blog at will. Control is the name of the game for the International Olympic Committee, which acknowledges blogging as a legitimate form of personal expression, but also sets strict guidelines on content.

According to a post on a UK sports journalists web site, blogging athletes are subject to strict IOC copyright rules and broadcast rights restrictions, which prevents them from using sound clips and videos, in effect furthering NBC’s commercial stranglehold on the games. Blogging athletes are also prohibited from using Olympic logos, including the five Olympic rings — who knew that anyone could restrict the use of such a widely known international symbol?

But still, it’s progress. During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, athletes were prohibited from blogging altogether. Read more here.

Social media Olympics
If Beijing was the warmup, the Vancouver 2010 is the first full-on, real-time social media Olympics.  you can’t poke your head into the internet these days without seeing a blog post, tweet or some other electronic message from athletes and media.

The Huffington Post has compiled a great list of Twitter sources at the Vancouver Games, including athletes like snowboarder Steve Fisher and Shaun White, along with Olympic journalists and even tweets from Vancouver locals. All this is compiled on one page, with a steady stream of live tweets feeding in constantly: Click here.

(more…)

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Blog-o-rama: Dancing chimps, ninja wings and good tequila

Posted on February 11, 2010 by Bob Berwyn

Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, is getting some attention because there may be some water beneath the surface. PHOTO COURTESY NASA.

This week we feature a new Breck eatery, a local photoblog, dancing chimps and news from deep space. We are in the blogosphere!

Wings with a ninja kick
Every week we take a gander around the blogosphere to see what folks in Colorado have on their minds. We start in Breckenridge, where Ashley Dickson, who blogs as the Gypsy Journalist, checked out a new eatery recently and reported that Northside Pizza dishes up some tasty pies at reasonable prices, along with wings that pack a ninja kick.

Here’s an excerpt from her post, describing her boyfriend’s first encounter with the wicked wings:

“Jake had talked a lot of game before the wings arrived, and after he shoved one in his mouth, he went completely silent.

“This is just wrong,” he pleaded. “My whole body is sweating. I feel messed up. Look, I’m shaking. Who would do this to themselves?”

No amount of water or bread could cool the fire, and I watched the boys writhe in agony as they waited for the heat to subside. I admit, I was laughing at their pain, and I couldn’t help but think of the guy from Man vs. Food on the Travel Channel. No wonder that show has garnered such a fan base. it’s kinda fun to see grown men cry over chicken wings.

The bartender wouldn’t reveal the secret mix of spices that gave the Double Black Diamond their ninja kick to the gut, but he admitted that the peppers registered into the hundred thousands on the Scoville heat scale. To put that in perspective, a jalapeno pepper comes out to 5,000 on the scale.” Read the rest of the blog about Northside Pizza here.

(more…)

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Mountain Blog-o-rama: Camels, crockpots and Thin Mints

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Bob Berwyn

The latest member of our blogroll is From the Styx, reporting on the life and times of Silt, Colorado.

You never know what you’ll find when you scan the blogosphere, and this week we came up with tamarisk-eating camels, a riff on Girl Scout cookies and some impromptu crockpot meals

SUMMIT COUNTY — It’s time for our weekly mountain blog-o-rama, where we take a look at what people from around the mountains are posting. For starters, we’ve added a voice from the West Slope, where author Peggy Tibbets maintains a blog called From the Styx.

(more…)

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The mountain blogosphere

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Bob Berwyn

Colorado classic: Longs Peak in the winter. Photo by Dougald MacDonald.

A roundup of some notable posts on mountain blogs

SUMMIT COUNTY — We’ve added a couple of new Colorado voices to our blogroll, including an irreverent look at life from northwestern Colorado on Outta the Cornfield, and a relatively new and stylish web site and blog called Colorado Mountain Journal, or MoJo for short.

We’ll keep an eye on these and publish excerpts of their posts with links to the original location, like this post by Colorado MoJo editor Dougald MacDonald about a Fort Collins resident who is planning to climb every 14er in the lower 48 states, solo and self-supported, reaching the peaks on a bicycle he’s designing and building especially for the trip.

Here’s an excerpt from MacDonalds story on MoJo:

You know that sticker that says, “My best vacation is your worst nightmare”? Josh Holley  is planning a summer vacation that’s jaw-droppingly difficult. Time will tell if it turns out to be a dream or a nightmare.

Holley, 20, is going to attempt to climb every 14er in the Lower 48, solo and self-supported, without ever getting into a car or plane. Holley, who lives in Fort Collins and works at Noodles & Company (and also builds and sells single-speed and commuter bikes for extra cash), is building a custom bike on which he’ll carry all the gear for his three- or four-month odyssey. We asked him to describe his plan in more detail.

Holley, describes the plan in his own words after the break:

(more…)

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