Colorado 'tire home' hits road blocks
GRANBY, Colo. -- The Hagar home near Granby has a typical description: two bedrooms, three baths and a two-car attached garage. That's where its commonality ends, because the house was constructed of 17,000 tires compressed into bales and then fashioned into 6-foot-thick walls.
Using tires for construction has great merit, in that it uses a plentiful material that has been literally stacking up over the decades: 128 million of them, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association. As well, the thick insulation creates a thermal mass that keeps the home at 60 to 70 degrees in summer, and sometimes warmer in winter. That minimizes the need for fossil fuels. Most of the heat can be delivered by passive solar.
Sounds wonderful, does it not? But, Laura Hagar tells the Sky-Hi Daily News, there is a problem. Financing construction of this home was not possible through conventional sources. The United States has only a handful of such houses. As such, the Hagars were rejected by 30 different mortgage brokers and lenders.
"There are no other houses like this, so if you can't find comparables, you can't get an appraisal. If you can't get an appraisal, you can't get a mortgage," Laura Hagar said.
But Hagar also was annoyed with building codes. The amalgamation of all those codes, she said, results in people's sticking with what is known instead of trying something new.
Aspenites warned of pine tree die-off
ASPEN, Colo. -- Since 1996, when the current mountain pine beetle epidemic got underway in Colorado, the hardest hit areas have been mostly north of Interstate 70. But this year, Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley have been warned to expect their lodgepole pines to begin turning rust colored as fungus carried by the beetles into the trees cuts off transport of water and nutrients to the needles.
But Jan Burke, of the U.S. Forest Service, said the impact won't be as great as in the Vail, Frisco and Winter Park areas. The lodgepole pine in the Roaring Fork Valley, she said, have greater age diversity and are not as extensive. But she said there is no chance of stopping the spread of the beetles.
Meanwhile, Regional Forester Rick Cables was in Washington, D.C., to present his case for larger appropriations from Congress for harvesting of dead and dying trees in Colorado and Wyoming.
Cables has been making the case that tree cutting will be necessary to avert forest fires. Those fires could be extremely damaging to watersheds used for municipal and agriculture water supplies, he maintains.
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Park City celebrates 125 years
PARK CITY, Utah -- On a recent Saturday evening, Park City toasted its own birthday, now at 125 candles.
The town's roots were in mining, which created the narrow, slightly twisting main street that even today remains the public face for the community and its three ski areas. Less public is the fact that the old mining tunnels also provide the town's water.
After mining skidded in the 1960s, the ski areas began operations. Success was not immediate.
"It was a ghost town," says Gene Carr, describing the scenes he photographed in the early 1970s.
Main Street, he says, was so empty he could have fired a cannon without hitting someone, he told The Park Record.
Taking stock of its community now, the newspaper reflected upon its contradictions: rural yet cosmopolitan, small but bustling, out of the way but well known. Therein, said the newspaper, lies the charm.
Green candidates lose out in co-op elections
EAGLE, Colo. -- Again this spring, elections at many electrical co-ops in Colorado mountain valleys were contested. But the challengers who campaigned for more aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions came out on the losing end in nearly every race.
The lone exception was in the Holy Cross Energy race for a director representing the Eagle Valley. Adam Palmer, a planner for Eagle County, beat incumbent George Lamb, a real estate agent in Vail, by 30 votes. Palmer argues for a brisker pace in encouraging energy efficiency and pushing more renewables into the mix.
In the Yampa Valley, two challengers were turned back by incumbents on the board for Yampa Valley Electric, reports the Steamboat Pilot & Today. In Durango, a challenger who championed alternative energy and energy efficiency was similarly defeated in his bid to get a seat on the board of La Plata Electric.
