Spring Chipster Lisa Song offers a blogger’s glimpse into the tiny Colorado town where she is living and covering environmental and science issues for High Country News magazine.

Spring
May 7, 2010

The snow started to melt near the end of March, leaving great patches of soggy mud. Here’s the view from above town, where everything is a uniform brown.

Paonia is part of Delta County, prime land for fruit orchards. If the frozen cherries in my fridge are any proof (a crop from last summer which I now use for the occasional cherry pie), the local cherries, peaches and nectarines are to die for.

Soon we started getting weekly visitors in the office, people selling eggs from their hens and a couple farmers toting homemade tamales. One High Country News employee has two sons who hiked the local ditch path, harvesting wild asparagus—possibly the most delicious greens I’ve ever eaten.

By the last week of April, the entire valley was marvelously green. The photo below was taken from the same place as the one above, and all the fruit trees are covered in white blossoms.

About five days later, nighttime temperatures dipped to 30F. The next morning all you could hear were people muttering darkly about the frost and whether it had killed the fruit trees. Apparently they survived pretty well: some of the farms have small windmills in the fields (for pumping groundwater, I think) that they turned on to create microclimates. The circulating air helped raise temperatures around the orchards and kept the blossoms alive. Having lived in cities and suburbia my entire life, it’s pretty cool to experience spring in a place where the weather means something more than what kind of coat to wear.

And now, just for fun, here’s a picture of Moab, Utah, taken during a hiking trip last week. It’s barely three hours from Paonia and a complete change of climate.

Redefining entertainment
April 11, 2010

Back in March, a rock slide closed I-70 for about a week. That highway is the major artery that connects us to eastern Colorado (where the big cities are), so we were essentially cut off from civilization. Cars had to go around a 200-mile detour. Some grocery stores in the region actually ran out of food (though Paonia was fine). Meanwhile, I had to go to Denver on a reporting trip. The company car was signed out. Greyhounds were too slow because of the rockfall. I ended up on a train—a crawling Amtrak that took nine hours for what would have been a five-hour trip by car. But the view was amazing; the train tracks go through Glenwood Canyon, directly above the Colorado River. Here are some of the pictures I took through the window:

And speaking of transportation, I got to ride a Conference Bike last week. It’s a seven-seater bike invented by artist Eric Staller. Everyone helps pedal (or not, if you’re feeling lazy) and one person steers. Someone in Paonia had bought one and let the High Country News team test drive it. We rode it straight down Paonia’s main street. Against traffic. Passersby ogled. Drivers honked. Luckily there were no cars in our lane. The verdict: the bike is a better stimulant than coffee. (Check out the blog post my fellow HCN intern wrote. And if you can’t tell, I’m the short one sitting in the middle of the second photo).

Noteworthy News from Paonia
Jan. 23, 2010

A week ago, four horses were running wild through the streets of this Colorado town. Drivers were told to beware, and the horses must have been retrieved somehow because I never saw any while walking home from work.

Then, the day before I left Paonia for Chips Quinn orientation, the news in town was a broken freezer at Don’s, the local supermarket. It stopped working late morning on a Wednesday, and here’s the reaction from the High Country News office:

Around noon Nick, another intern, goes to Don’s for lunch. He returns holding five boxes of Haagen-Dazs: “There’s ice cream in Don’s Dumpster! Tons of it!”

All the editors: “ICE CREAM?!”

Our Editor in Chief runs out the door.

Associate Editor follows at a sprint.

Assistant Editor calls her boyfriend so he can help cart stuff home to their freezer.

Writers on the Range Editor salvages two cakes, one chocolate, one vanilla.

Nick starts burying fruit bars, waffles, English muffins and steaks in a pile of snow, there being no freezer big enough in the office.

The staff converges on the chocolate cake. The rest of the town converges on the Dumpster. Just another day on the Western Slope…

The freezer at the intern house where I live is now crammed. And there’s a bag of fruit bars, lying in the backyard, enjoying the cooling effects of snow.

The Camel Invasion
Jan. 18, 2010

After two weeks at work, it’s obvious that I need a crash course in western politics. High Country News reports on issues of environment and policy in the western 11 states. On the surface it means we write about cute animals affected by the Endangered Species Act, the endless water wars over the region’s rivers, or solar and wind farms being built in various deserts. But that kind of stuff gets national attention, so HCN is really about the West with a capital W—the west of split estate, BLM, BuRec, the ebb and flow of the mining, oil and gas industries.

It’ll take some time for me to learn the context of these issues. The editors are all native Coloradans, so they have an incredible institutional memory. Any time I have a question they can deliver long oral histories that explain everything.

But one of my first assignments was something I felt comfortable about. In mid-January there was a symposium on tamarisk, the invasive plant that’s taking over thousands of acres. Coming from a science background, I thought it would be easy to find at least one story from the conference. Plus, it was held within driving distance of Paonia, and I even got a free press pass.

The day came and went. I watched a dozen scientists lecture from PowerPoint presentations. A lot of the material was fascinating, but it didn’t fit HCN. It was the kind of stuff that would’ve been perfect for a news update in Scientific American or Science magazine. So I went for the non-science angle. Someone had left a pile of pamphlets at the symposium, pamphlets that caused much head-scratching for the scientists. They were titled “Camels—the going green answer to tamarisk control.”

Here’s the blog post I eventually wrote. It actually got picked up by a DiscoveryNews blog, and it was probably the most fun I’d had in reporting for months.

Living in a Snow Globe
Jan 7, 2010

I’ve just moved to Paonia, Colo., for my internship at High Country News. The town has a bizarre mix of 1,500 people, 18 churches and two bars—one of which is housed in a former church and closes at 8 p.m. every night (at which time all the customers move across the street to the pizza restaurant for more beer, TV and sometimes live music).

One of the churches, just across the street from the house where the interns live, is striving toward European castle-hood:

This is the sort of small-town life I’ve often read about, but never experienced. Drivers wave at you when you cross the street. The post office worker knew me by name after my first visit (incidentally, everyone, or almost everyone in town has a P.O. box because there’s no street address postal delivery). The downside is that everything except the grocery store is closed on Sundays. Kind of problematic when you’re hunting for that elusive coffee house experience on the weekends.

By day Paonia looks like the inside of a snow globe. There are mountains in every direction and “hills” that would qualify as ski-worthy slopes anywhere in the East. A simple 20-minute walk toward the edge of town brought me to this sight:

Then there’s the “other Paonia,” which is much less fantastical. Most Paonians (is that a word?) work several jobs, doing part-time stints in offices, stores, construction, etc. Hundreds are employed by the neighboring coal mines, whose revenues support much of the town. The recent slump in the coal industry is having dire effects on school funding—they’re talking about shortening the elementary school week from five to four days to save money.

At night, and several times during the day, a trainload of coal rumbles past the town, doing its best to remind me that yes, I am truly in the West.

Lisa Song is a Spring 2009 Chips Quinn Scholar for High Country News in Paonia, Colo. She has an M.S. in science writing and a B.S. in environmental science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Song was an intern for the radio show “Living on Earth” and has freelanced for EARTH magazine. She has created museum exhibits and science education videos. She speaks French and spent a summer (2007) researching paleoclimatology in Aix-en-Provence, France.