News

• West End Roundup with the San Miguel Basin Forum
• Kris Tompkins on Rewilding the Mind
• A Placerville Poetry Box

---

West End Roundup with the San Miguel Basin Forum

Today on the West End Roundup with the San Miguel Basin Forum, we’re doing something a little different and taking a deep dive into the new Norwood School.

Norwood voters passed a bond measure last fall which, in addition to a large state grant, is allowing the school district to build a brand-new building next to the Lone Cone Library.

KOTO News spoke with San Miguel Basin Forum editor Regan Tuttle about the project.

Julia Caulfield (JC): Let’s start by going back in time. Can you talk about why the Norwood School District is in need of a new school?

Regan Tuttle (RT): We know that Norwood School has been in questionable shape for some time, and it was in the fall that the bond issue was going back to voters for the third time.

The Forum talked with Frank Golaszewski, who works in the building as the maintenance lead for Norwood Public Schools. He said then he felt like the building was a disaster from the first brick that was laid.

Frank told us leaks were the biggest concern. Leaks were such a plague in the fall that the mold issue had become one of great discussion. The mold was there, but when the state would come in to do their sampling, they would say that it was slow-growing because of the climate there.

There was and still is asbestos in the building everywhere. It was in the blocks in the high school wing for sure. They knew that they couldn’t drill holes in the block, but over time, some people had done that anyway.

The air handler units in the high school had tested positive for asbestos too, and Golaszewski had shut that down. There were literally worms and plants growing in the office area at times after periods of rain or spring snow. The bathroom in the hallway across from the office always had a drain issue.

There were other issues with leaks in the ceiling, and the school had tried to repair those several times through different processes, and those were really hard to address.

JC: As we’ve mentioned, the new school is now going in. So what’s the building going to look like?

RT: It’s going to be big.

At the Town of Norwood’s monthly meeting last week, the architect and the manager of the project gave an update and shared the design, what it’s going to look like and what the features are.

There will be a commons area for the entryway, and that’s going to be kind of like the heart of the new Norwood school, but it’s also a multipurpose room and a lunch space.

There’s also going to be a stage there for performances or theater, and there’s a music room behind that.

There will be a main gym, but also an auxiliary gym for practice or other activities, as well as a wrestling room, weight room and locker rooms.

The southwest part will be elementary classrooms along with special education, and on the other side of the facility there will be two stories, with middle school downstairs and high school above. That portion also will include a library, special education and another multipurpose room.

Some people questioned at the Town of Norwood meeting whether there will be enough classroom space. The architect said the building was designed according to the district’s instructions and that they were asked to implement 20 classrooms.

They also said the main gym will seat 500 people, so schoolwide assemblies or other events can happen there. There will be a playground for elementary students and a pre-K playground. They’re also taking into consideration Primetime Early Learning Center for infants that could be located on-site at some point.

JC: Some folks have shared concern about the land where the school is going in. What have you heard about that?

RT: We’ve had a couple of people reach out to the Forum with concerns, and they haven’t wanted to go on record because they support a new school. They’re questioning the school site.

We did reach out to Morgan Rummel because he’s a structural engineer and is on the school board. Rummel deferred questions to Randy Harris, also on the school board and the Town of Norwood’s public works director.

Harris has had a big hand in working and communicating with the architect and the company overseeing the project.

The Forum asked Harris: What’s going on here? Is this a problem? Is this safe, this ground being wetlands or, as some people have described it, swampy?

Harris said it’s absolutely buildable. He said the school district, school committee and board have done their due diligence. He said engineers have completed soil testing and preliminary engineering. He also said the state stepped in before awarding Norwood the BEST grant and determined the site was buildable.

JC: The school is breaking ground this week. Recognizing things may shift, what can folks expect for construction this summer?

RT: The groundbreaking happens May 21, and from that point on there is going to be an uptick in traffic, and the town, fire department, EMS and public works are all planning for it.

At this point, there has not been a reduction in speed, but the Town of Norwood is seriously discussing implementing a change in the speed limit to slow people down, especially with loads of gravel or fill dirt that will be coming in.

No law has been changed at this point, but even San Miguel County Sheriff Dan Covault said it’s something that really needs to be considered.

Officials also have discussed potentially limiting traffic flow to one way going in and out. Probably by June they’re expected to make a decision on that at their June meeting.

Mayor Candy Meehan has said it’s something they really need to get in place, especially with the Four Seasons project coming up as well.

The San Miguel Basin Forum is a locally owned and operated newspaper out of Nucla, Colorado. Visit SanMiguelBasinForum.com for weekly news, events, and local happenings in the West End.

---

Kris Tompkins on Rewilding the Mind

Kris Tompkins was the CEO at Patagonia when she stepped into the conservation world. She wanted a change, but didn’t know what.

Tompkins ended up meeting the man who would become her husband, Doug Tompkins, and soon they were off to remote Chile.

“We fell in love almost immediately. I retired on a Friday and that Sunday left with some things out of my beach house. That was in 1993,” Tompkins said. “We started buying land, eventually creating 16 national parks — about 16 million acres.”

As the co-founder of Tompkins Conservation along with Doug, who has since passed, Tompkins is an icon in conservation, working to reintroduce species that are extinct and fragile into the landscape.

Tompkins is in Telluride this weekend for Mountainfilm. She sat down with KOTO to talk more about her work and rewilding the mind.

Julia Caulfield (JC): How do you stay engaged and motivated in the conservation field?

Kris Tompkins (KT): I think I’m prone to go toward what I consider the wild side of my character.

I mourn for wildness and not just the non-human world, but also, of course, in certain areas around the world in human communities.

It’s a nightmare and it’s devolving.

I think when you really believe that all life has intrinsic value, even when humans don’t place that value on it. If you really believe that, then you’ve got to decide, well, how am I going to contribute toward wholeness and beauty? That’s a great motivator.

JC: You work in rewilding spaces, but what does that mean to you? What does that look like?

KT: Well, first of all, I think we humans, the first step in what I will describe as rewilding is we have to rewild our own minds.

I’m going to be 76 in June, and I know that even in our generation the idea of wildness has been completely drummed out of us. It didn’t take so long.

I think we have to rewild our own minds.

That said, rewilding is really taking territories where you can do it and bring back species, even the difficult ones, jaguars, you know, we work with 35 different species, many of them top predators, so they’re largely disappeared. They’re never winning any popularity contests because whether it’s jaguars or pumas and so on.

We believe our work isn’t just, oh, let’s go conserve land. As Lois Crisler said years and years ago, landscape without wildlife is just scenery. We never intended or would accept that we were just in the scenery business.

So that, you know, once you understand those things, that way you’re not just conserving territory and creating national parks. You have to see before you walk away that those territories are fully functioning.

That means that the forests are back, the top predators are back, the giant river otters are back in the rivers, and so on and so forth, that things are functioning to the greatest extent possible wherever we’re working, that’s the goal.

JC: Many people don’t live near these wild spaces that you’re working in or places we may consider wilderness. With that in mind, how do you encourage people to tap into the wildness of their brain or the wilderness of their space, wherever it might be?

KT: When I die and I come back as I don’t know who I would work in urban parks, because those are the parks where you reach the most people.

Of course there’s real wildness where nature is fully evolving and it’s as pristine a state as possible. There’s that, but that’s as you say, that’s far and few between.

I really believe that national parks, they’re one thing and they’re important and I hope to God they always exist. But the real rekindling of this relationship between we humans and the non-human world has to begin next door to you or in your own backyard or on your own town park because you learn to start paying attention again.

It’s not that people don’t have wildness nearby. It’s that they don’t know it exists. They don’t know what to call it. You are in nature and you do have a role to go help save her.

But this is the iconography of modernity, is to diffuse our ancient connections with nature. This is what you have to fight against all the time, even within ourselves. Just stop, and listen and decide that that’s the team you want to be on.

Yes, you’re human, but I want to do more with my life. I want to know more in this life about where I am, who am I living next to and what on earth am I supposed to be doing to protect human and non-human life, regardless of the role that comes your way.

JC: For people who hear that and they want to be part of it, but they have a million things going on and it feels so big, what would you say is the first step?

KT: The number one thing you have to do is to decide that you want to be a part of beauty and goodness, nature. You have to decide that every day you’re going to get out of bed and you’re going to do something that has nothing to do with your own life. It will add to your life, but it’s not about you.

That is the hard thing for anybody to decide.

It’s participating and saying, I’m not going to abdicate my life nor all life into the future, because right now that’s what we’re doing.

If you’re doing nothing, you are saying, “okay, I give, I’m going to flow into whatever evolves in human society and nature be damned or whatever is going to take place.” But you have no reason to do that.

Can you imagine abdicating your future? No.

Take something that you like doing and you’re good at and decide that from now on, I’m going to do something that fights not just for the Jones and the Smiths on either side of our house, but for the birds and the frogs and all these things, the trees in your yard who cannot defend themselves.

Be a champion for those things largely unseen.

Just get started. That the painful I think thing will kill people is doing nothing.

Kris Tompkins will participate in a number of events throughout the Mountainfilm weekend, including the Minds Moving Mountains Speaker Series: Evidence-Based Hope talk on Friday, May 22, at 11 a.m. at High Camp in Mountain Village.

She will also appear at the Wild Beyond Borders talk on Saturday, May 23, at 12:15 p.m. at The Palm.

---

A Placerville Poetry Box

Driving into San Miguel Canyon, about one mile from the intersection with Highway 62, travelers may spot a box at a roadside pullout.

“I had it in my head, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a place on the highway where people could take poems,’” said local poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

“People pull over here all the time to talk on the phone or rummage around in their backseat for something,” Trommer said. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe they would stop and get a poem.’”

So Trommer had her husband build a box — more like a notice board seen at a trailhead — for poems.

A poetry box.

The box stands more than 6 feet tall and is painted bright yellow with purple, blue, orange and green flowers.

“It has a glass door that opens into a cork board where I post poems, and other people can also post poems there,” Trommer said. “To that end, there is a pullout drawer that has pens and pencils and cardstock papers, and you could write your own poem on a foldout desk. It’s a perfect height. Standing right here by the highway, you could write a poem and post it right inside that gorgeous little cabinet.”

While it stands alone on the side of the road, Trommer sees it as a community gathering place.

“It is such a sweet way for us to communicate with each other, especially because we are so far-flung,” Trommer said. “I have to tell you how much I love that it isn’t digital. I’m looking at one that was clearly written by Art Goodtimes. Who would not recognize Art Goodtimes’ handwriting once you had seen it? That is something you don’t get on the computer, something so personal. Even the ripped edge of the paper — just to see people’s handwriting and have it up in an old-fashioned way. The humanity of it is so exciting to me.”

In the hubbub of technology and artificial intelligence, Trommer believes poetry helps people explore what it means to be human.

“What it is to regret. What it is to wonder. What it is to feel two things at the very same time and feel tugged in opposite directions and know that’s what it is,” Trommer said. “That we are the all of it. I love the way poems bring this out. It just allows us to show up as our raw, imperfect selves.”

A smattering of poems fills the box, with different handwriting scrawled across the pages.

The featured poem on this day is “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

• Ada Limón

“One of the things I love about this poem, and I feel like it’s really at the heart of the poetry box, is this clarity that things are hard,” Trommer said. “Sometimes you want to give up. I know I do. How do we go on? Here is the poem, and here’s the trees, and they show us this is how we go on. We honor the world around us. We honor each other. We do it slow and patiently. It doesn’t happen very fast.”

So, while driving down the highway of life — or Colorado Highway 145 — at top speed, take a moment to slow down, pause and write a poem.

---

Women’s Group to Focus on Connection

Women carry a lot on their shoulders.

This week, the Wilkinson Public Library is teaming up with local counselors to host a Women’s Empowerment Group.

Kaity Swick and Sally Harris Porter will lead the group, which focuses on fostering deeper connections with women in the community and with oneself.

The group will include a mix of somatic practices, mindfulness exercises and practical tools rooted in mind-body awareness.

The Women’s Empowerment Group will take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 26, at the Wilkinson Public Library and will meet on the fourth Tuesday of each month. Registration is available at telluridelibrary.org.

---

Colorado Democrats Censure Polis

The divide between Colorado Democrats and Gov. Jared Polis continues to widen over his decision to shorten former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters’ prison sentence.

The state Democratic Party voted Wednesday evening to formally censure the governor. The move effectively bars Polis from official party events.

Democratic Party leaders said the governor’s clemency order undermined election integrity and democratic institutions. Polis has defended the decision, saying Peters’ sentence was overly harsh and violated her constitutional rights.

Peters was convicted of allowing unauthorized access to Mesa County voting machines following the 2020 election.

---

Colorado Farmers Face Tough Choices Amid Drought

About 87% of water use in Colorado goes to agriculture, meaning the state’s farmers and ranchers are often faced with difficult decisions during dry years.

As Rocky Mountain Community Radio’s Caroline Llanes reports, Colorado State University surveys found farmers say the health of their land and their financial well-being are among the biggest impacts of drought.

Retta Bruegger, with CSU’s Grand Junction extension office, said Colorado farmers and ranchers are already making decisions about how they will manage this year’s exceptionally dry conditions.

That includes determining whether they will have enough grazing resources for livestock and deciding whether to buy additional hay or sell some animals.

“Some folks are prioritizing early-season crops, if they’re in like a specialty vegetable situation where they’re worried they’re going to run out of water midseason,” Bruegger said. “They may be prioritizing high-value crops that can be grown early on.”

Drought also can affect mental health in the agricultural industry.

CSU said requests for its mental health services for farmers between January and March this year were 40% higher than during the same period in any previous year.