The following list begins with the most polluted and undesirable regions and communities in the Smart Shelter Service Area and ends with the healthiest...noting (we hope) experiences and conclusions...especially from the EI community itself (which is the best indicator any of us can use for toxicity)...types of pollution, their relative levels and worst seasons of the year.

The text here focuses on environmental qualities in regional communities as ingredients for locations for EIs and others to live. It does not (at this writing) examine ingredients which should also be included in selections...such as prices, regulatory amenability to natural building technologies, etc. Those ingredients and characteristics are fairly well known, though they change constantly, to Smart Shelter. Some of them are documented and published elsewhere in the Smart Shelter documents and Resource Files (go back to our home page for links). If your questions are specific, contact Smart Shelter for advice and synopsis.

Grand Junction/ Grand Valley-The worst in the region.... Grand Junction (now regionally referred to as Western Colorado's "Little L.A.") even has its own designer colored smoke/haze...purplish brown. No other community in the area has that color. The stench from Grand Junctions also legendary midwinter temperature inversions can be smelled as far away as Kannah Creek(20 miles) approaching with nostrils cleared with the Escallante Canyon air from the south. Grand Junction presents the characteristic unique quality of Western Colorado pollution problems because of the geometrically escalating traffic problems (fueled by pathetic levels of growth control and accommodation) combined with its antiquated population's remnant romance with wood stove winter heating..kind of like letting a neanderthal drive a semi trailer truck on the I 70 freeway. Inversions lock in characteristically for two week scenarios two to three times per winter ...January and February are the worst. Ag land surrounding Grand Junction suffers an even worse than average crop and ditch bank burning problem in the swing seasons (spring and fall) given that this insanity is mechanized in the Grand Junction area to the levels of huge tractor-mounted burners accompanied by fuel tankers reminiscent of war-zone flame throwers...literally spewing columns of fire 50 to 60 feet across roadways and ditches leaving a black (not just gray) column of smoke resembling burning tire factories visible as pinpointing columns piercing the blue Colorado sky visible from 30 miles distant. Drive to the top of Grand Mesa in spring and fall for an objective taste of the problems...substantialted by local cardiopulmonary physicians who experience epidemic office visits from asthmatic children who can't breathe exactly coinciding with the inversions and ditch burns. Probably the worst problem, though, is the wood stoves...and the one most easily cured.

Wind drift is generally to the north west...down valley, but the winter north wind can counter it, pushing the pollution up to Kannah Creek and Clifton. Glade park, because of its elevation, is probably the safest area in the vicinity. The hazes taper out with distance from the urban core, but my sister in Fruita chirps every winter about the inversion there. She has no wood stove, either...smart girl.

Delta- This little berg is a dilemma. Surprisingly happy and innocent population regionally known for its remarkable spirit of community compassion and health is also, sadly, the area's worst for ag crop and ditch burning...spring and fall. Probably the slowness that makes some parts of the community so attractive is also the reason that the ag community is so far behind other areas in adopting permaculture, lined ditches and environmentally saner (and more cost effective) alternatives to "the singed earth syndrome" The worst area is North Delta on the road toward Hotchkiss..regionally referred to as the North Delta Burn Corridor.....probably just a particularly dense accumulation of particularly dense farmers. The recent Division of Wildlife tamarisk burns in the Roubidouz bottoms toward Grand Junction (spring 04) would run a close second...and maddeningly unnecessary contributors to an already unhealthy and economically debilitating pollution level.

Delta's traffic has not yet produced air quality dilemmas of magnitude for concern, but the remnant population still choking from their wood stoves does. Drainage air currents along the Gunnison River provide small corridors of reprieve. Levels of herbicide application and aerial crop spraying are clear off the scale, as is the entire corridor from Delta past Pea Green, epicentered in Olathe (where the chemical distributor tanks are on main street) and well through the Montrose area. Of particular danger are planters of Olathe Sweet Corn, which is a monoculture crop attracting (of course) its favorite worm pest, which in the eyes of chemo-ag and CSU Extension Agents (chemoindustry's best sales lackeys) means drenching the "edible corn" with pesticides...now escalating to sometimes 3-4 applications per season. It won't be long until this monoculture boondoggle extincts itself, but already, legendary numbers of neighbors with sick horses and children are pleading for help and reprieve...all to no avail in the "ag-controled" region. Severe warning here for land purchases adjacent to sweetcorn farmers.

Delta, despite its high rating for toxicity, also seems to provide the most potential for intelligent hope, because of the mentality there which has seemingly (so far) escaped the snarling panic out-of-control growth has brought to the Grand Junction and Montrose areas. A solarization program and high efficiency bio-fuel or natural gas stove conversion program could clean that communities wood stove problem up quick. Alternatives to herbacides...especially a municipal project like Ridgway's CATPAW would certainly lower the chemical industry disease rate there. Delta area ag industry would be the number one candidate area (after the predominantly already organic vicinity around Paonia) for ramping down the "singed earth" practices of farmers to buffer zone habitat ditches and bio-composting field fertilization...even permaculture diversity heading the local industry away from the terrorism of monoculture ag businesses (and their forever prolific losses and farm subsidy demands on our tax pocketbooks)

Recommended locales in Delta would include Ash and Garnet Mesa, the adobe fringes north of North Delta, the Peach Valley Area...home of a really laughable land scam early this century...from which its ironic name derives. Go have a look at Peach Valley...you'll see what we mean.

Olathe-Despite its small town flare, this is the epicenter for the chemical Ag business...probably centered there because everyone elsewhere was wiser. Nowhere else in Western Colorado do we find the huge toxic agribusiness chemical tanks on Main Street and looming over homes. There seems little hope for this berg, well on its way to ghettoization. The area to the west///toward Pea Green is deceptively attractive until the yellow crop duster aircraft starts drenching the Olathe Sweet Corn crops with the pesticides now mandated up to 4 times per season because monoculture ag insanity has managed to bless us with a voracious worm that thinks sweetcorn is great..a conclusion those of us insistent on non-drenched food sources have long ago forsaken. Most EI's know better than to eat sweet corn...none of us could survive the vicinities where it's grown. Many of the neighboring residents surrounding these sprayed lands weren't EI's when it began, but certainly are now.

The adobe badlands areas to the northeast of Olathe and the extreme boundaries with BLM land to the west are the safest here...watch for BLM's herbicide programs...go talk to their Montrose regional office biologists about their next "nuke" areas before you buy or rent.

Montrose- Montrose pretty much duplicates the conditions discussed regarding Delta...except that here there is no hope. The difference between the two communities is not in the levels of pollution and sources...Montrose only trailing Delta marginally for wood stove and herbicide abuse...but in the mentality differences between the communities. Delta, though it would appear more sleepy and backwards, is historically much more amenable to reason and its leaders much more capable of getting out of their egos (and the inevitable business corruption that so riddles small town councils and county commissioners) and into legitimate community welfare and health....which Delta has not done a bad job with, given where it is. Much more is needed. Montrose, however, is the bastion of the literally vicious , an unwarranted level of wannabe social arrogance and a penchant for "contempt prior to investigation" unparalleled in Western Colorado...and consequently quite terminal. Walk into the Park Avenue True Value hardware store and ask them to remove the lawn chemicals from the interior air because you can't breathe (in summer, the chemical stench will overwhelm you at the front door) and witness a level of snarling self-righteous contempt you never dreamed possible. The entire town is run on exactly that fuel. As a consequence Riverbottom Park, their bike path, all the streets and probably 90% of private yards and 99% of ag land are burned and herbicide drenched with a tenacity rivaling only Grand Junction itself. Approach to reason and alternatives is actually a dangerous undertaking here. The sprawl and deterioration of an already problematical community is probably Western Colorado's most pathetic (county and municipal) example of failures at growth control and intelligent accommodation (despite generations and tidal waves of community meetings and consensus supporting intelligence and moderation...all of which have been ignored by city and county administrators...and newspapers... bludgeoned into growth-for-growth's-sake lackieism by bankers and the real estate industry). The toxic, carcinogenic suburban/industrial sprawl in Montrose serve as legend here to the dominance of the banking, real estate and main street business intent on milking the community for whatever meager profits possible, leave it choking and writhing in the borrow ditch and move on to another mecca.

Once the home of the Tabauache Ute Chief Ouray...who died, as he insisted, before having his land ripped from under him...part of which is now the parking lot for the Montrose Home Depot and Walmart...the surviving leader of the indigenous people of Montrose...Shavano...left a curse on the valley as they were lied to one more time and escorted to Utah (they were told their new land would be at Grand Junction). That curse explains graphically both the panicked, angry mentality of this latest generation of the white invader hordes and their economic failure rate...which is landmark in this community. The Ute Curse decreed that although the white man may take this land, he would never take prosperity or happiness from it...both of which are consistently true to this day. To the Ute Curse has been added a "Liquefaction Curse" by modern proponents, based on modern geology and physics. The adobe soil on which Montrose (and ever single one of its building foundations) lies turns to jellied muck on saturation...which this valley once was...a giant, mucky inland swamp...ooze too stinky and thick for mammals to walk. The water tables, now rising everywhere in the Montrose area from inappropriate irrigation and lawn watering (now spreading metastatically with each new subdivision) have produced epidemic house settling problems now (although still kept fairly well under wraps by the real estate industry) at such a level of problems that engineers are throwing thousands of extra dollars into foundation concrete and steel pylons(a joke, given the depth of the adobe muck under the town...which is 1500 feet) for new homes (which still sink) and the financial industry is in a "mucky tither". The Liquefaction Curse is real, piled on top of the certainly justified Ute Curse. We will live to see the day, quite literally, when nothing but a couple of abandoned church steeples bleaching in the sun will be left raising their pleading hands of the drowning for help...the rest of the town thankfully and justifiably sunk into the muck and drowned forever. One of the most prophetic and ingenious system of curses and legacy ever devised. The victims produced the consequences through their own stupidity, greed and complete disregard for the welfare of the land on which they live (not to mention what they did to the previous owners in order to make the Uncompahgre Valley "Christian"). You can help move the Liquefaction Curse along. Definitely, you are not going to want to live there. But there's nothing wrong with a shopping spree to get the off-grid equipment for your Micro at Walmart. On your way through town, just turn on all the tap water faucets you can find and let the white man's water quench his greedy thirst. If we all opened 50 or 60 taps every trip through town we would be free once and for all of the 10 maddeningly unsynchronized stoplights and the 20 minute unnecessary delay navigating this disgustingly little estuary of the moron faction. Wouldn't you be much better driving from Delta to the Wiesbaden Vapor Caves in Ouray whizzing at 70 miles per hour over a perfectly flat adobe salt flat simply punctuated by the top 15 feet of what used to be the steeples of the Mormon and the catholic churches...now, along with the rest of this snarly little repressed pit of toxic ooze...safely entombed in stiff adobe clay and commemorated forever to the bastions of legacy and the eons of planetary history which simply eat atrocity and greed for lunch. Yes, Yes, Yes...the Montrose Liquefaction Curse. Certainly with a legacy and baggage like that, not a place for healthy people to settle. Wood stove problem here is as bad as it is in Delta and Grand Junction....as the oxygen bottles and nose hoses visible at City Market any day of the week will attest.

Isolated pockets of health and sanity, however, outside the perimeter of the curse(the boundaries of the curse are precise and there are people still in the area who know exactly the locations of its perimeter). If you find such a pocket, you may soon find yourself surrounded by another bribe-authorized and rubber-stamped subdivision no matter where you go... Best areas to check out...probably the Shavano Valley Area (watch out for the lure of Spring Creek Mesa...though wind currents do keep it clean) and areas east toward the adobes....also Chief Shavano's own ranch and home site are near Billy Creek/ Colona (are you beginning to see the pattern here in terms of who used to live there, what Montrose did to them and what is now escaping the Ute and the Liquefaction Curses? Pay attention, you'll find these ingredients extremely precise given your knowledge of history and location). The south valley corridor from Montrose, luring with its pristine views and ambiance are also riddled with crop dusters and ag burning regularly

Rifle-This is an area of particularly sad irony...tremendously growth impacted due to the cancerous swell of the Roaring Fork Valley, down stream and taking the hardest hit from the spit-out contingents of that growth, right in the midst of the remnant and still pyromaniacal ag industry and host to some of the most horrifically damaged public lands in the state...a virtual bastion of the gun nuts and the atv thugs...which, does, however, get even worse as you travel on down the mighty Colorado to Parachute, Battlement Mesa and Debeque. Let us not forget that, even as the oil and natural gas industry here ransack the public and private lands of this area with, without a doubt, the most horrific toxic impacts anywhere in the state...the worst threat still remaining is the fallout from the two atomic bombs (yes, folks...thermonuclear devices) that were exploded at depth under Rulison a few years back in what we all said, and is now openly admitted by the government and industry representatives who pocketed the take from this diabolitrous scheme to fracture oil shale allowing petroleum extraction....to be a dismal failure at tax payer expense and now a deadly underground residue slated to remain for a couple of hundred thousand years and into which the same government and oil industry now insist they want to drill gas wells...want your natural gas kitchen stove to glow in the dark and rupture geiger counters...???? Move here.

The public lands outside Rifle are the abuse grounds of this state's most disastrous infestation of obsessive/compulsive weapons owners...BLM lands are rifled with spent casings and left targets...shot at, unfortunately, by some of the most piss-poor marksmen ever to disgrace Western Colorado...go figure. I can blow a hole in your belt buckle three shots out of four at 250 yards. These gooks can't hit a paper bulls eye at 60 feet...measured by the thousands of targets they leave...with a consistency that would stand a snowballs chance in hell competing with the attention span of a drunk gnat. Putting up with their incessant semiautomatic weapons fire 8 hours every single day of the week as a backdrop to quiet camping enjoyment of the public legacy certainly indicates its time to put the gun nuts in their own indoor, soundproofed shooting ranges (and lock the door). It's bad elsewhere...but nowhere like this.

Ouray-You would think, 9 miles up the road from Ridgway, that these would be sister towns...not. The progressive free spirit of Ridgway is starkly (often antagonistically) at odds with the cloudy, depressive, snarlying..and for some reason prolifically drug and alcohol addicted population base for Ouray (also, of course, primarily republican). Part of this is due to past origins in the cheap-over the road tourism industry Ouray mistakenly courted and developed in bygone years leading to the typical glot of overzealous and insidiously insecure main street business owners...who, of course, use their meager profits (or charge cards) to underpay minimum wage employees so they can get the free time themselves to cow-tow local politics and the chamber of commerce into more extraordinarily ill advised policies...like allowing the newly restored Beaumont Hotel to commandeer 12 public right of way parking spaces from street domain, heat them (bare open concrete at 20 below zero all winter) so their elitist customers (who still seem to fail to exist) won't have to freeze their slippery tootsies on steep ice) to the result that this monstrosity stands dry and completely unused at local taxpayer expense by the entrepreneurs who financed this extraordinarily beautiful restoration job housing pathetically misconceived republican businesses ad nausium.

Wood stoves reek their stench. Particularly pathetic is the large three story pseudo victorian trophy home a half block uphill from the Wiesbaden Vapor Caves and Hot Springs pool which burns coal in their fireplaces and renders the air quality at the outdoor pond of this spa absolutely unbreathable most nights every winter. For a town completely underlain with geothermal hot water (135-165 degrees) already piped throughout the town, spewed in prodigious volume still hot into the Uncompahgre River from the Ouray Pool without even the thought of recapturing that energy...not to have long ago banned all wood and coal stoves from the already unbreathable air of this particularly snarly and toxic little berg is only explainable by virtue of the republican main street business morons that run it. If there was ever a justified and pressing need for productive application of gas-chamber technology it is here...nuke the political structure of Ouray and replace it with sanity...then heat it with geothermal.

The potentials this town is wasting are legendary and well into the red-zone of criminal.

Ironically, because not all the picture is that bleak, there is a large population of freethinkers and environmentally competent citizens who could take this place over, recognize that indeed, this is the box canyon of all box canyons and start treating the air quality and geothermal assets with the respect and remediation our simplest technology support and certainly the environment needs.

The irony and history or Ouray, however, may be easily be explained. The Wiesbaden and the several other hot springs in the Ouray Box canyon were the sacred sites of the Utes...the Wiesbaden, the personal spring of Chief Ouray himself. The Ute curse stipulated that though the white man may take this land, it and everything on it would never make him happy and his endeavors would forever fail...paints a viable and invariably predictive answer to the consistent failure of main street shops in Ouray (not to mention its astronomical divorce rate) and maddening turnover. Every spring you have to walk main street twice, just to remark what went where...in 6 blocks...go figure.

What Ouray needs...and maybe you are the matriarch/patriarch...is a butt-kicking, vehement environmental visionary with means which would keep them forever independent of the local economy (and consequent inbreeding and corruption) to undertake and inevitable "cleansing" and conversion of this gem of western colorado into its healthy potential. I would not personally recommend any white man attempt doing that (aside from the risk of getting promptly shot...by your own people) without the cooperation and endorsement of the legacy Utes...with whom several of us are in contact...but who, for the most part have lost all memory and connection with this place in five generations of disconnected legacy they've undergone on the Ft. Duschesne Reservation incarceration. The irony here is exactly like that of Montrose, but here we aren't dealing with the homes we stole from them, but their churches...their spiritual centers themselves. The depth of these curses are real and in the case of Ouray, legendary. Ignore them and you will wish you hadn't....although most who experience their legendary failures leave broke, tails between their legs and never realizing what it was that wrote the prescription they swallowed. The further hurdle is that, like an old World War Two armed bomb, set to go off when a doorknob is triggered...those who set it and know the secrets of its disarming are not just gone...but for generations lost. I can bring high-powered Utes to the site about any day...in fact have stood there with them...but they don't know what happened either...much less how to turn it around. In responses from one of them regarding the Utes' desire to reclaim this land, one elder said, "why the hell would I want to pay taxes for land your 100 year old laws prevent me from using in the manner my thousand year old legacy knows will work here (because it did). He's impatient to get back to the Utah reservation because he directs the multimillion dollar gas drilling industry fueled by the surprising discovery of deep fruits this "trash land" Brigham Young described as: "unfit for jackrabbits...give it to the Utes" is now a resource gold mine the Utes are selling to the white man to finance multimillion dollar lawsuits to gain justice for the treaty violations that cost them their homelands, their way of life and nearly all of their culture. Roland said, in response to one white guy's query regarding whether he or any other Utes still live in the old ways..."why would I give up my new pickup truck and satellite tv channel changer to live in a Teepee.?"

So, Charlie, if you're going to be the one to kick but on the Ute Curse still plaguing Ouray and turn it around ...into the environmental gem it could become...if you are another Bulkley Wells, Tabor or whatever...you're left to your own resources dealing with this one. But I'll tell you where I'd start...its in the hot springs cave of the Wiesbaden...because you will find that deep base tones from the human voice reminiscent of the chanting of Tibetan Monks (probably the distant ancestors of the American Indians) lights up the interior of that cave to nearly spiritual resonance...given you know how to find the focal points and understand resonant frequencies. Getting a little too far out there? Got any better ideas? Go for it....we're taking notes.

Telluride-The irony of Western Colorado growth, which originated with first the Aspen incubator in the 50's and 60's, then the twin resorts Crested Butte and Telluride in the 70's where coughing L.A. refugees flocked for a cleaner life...and fell in love with their requisite pet dogs (which killed 28 mountain sheep in one season) and wood stoves (which in 1978 produced State Health Department store-top air quality monitor readings that three times in one winter exceeded the worst days in L.A....in Telluride). The culprit is the box canyon and its boilerplate inversions. The PM10 particles from traffic dust have pretty much been dealt with by paving the streets. Valiant and intelligent fireplace and wood stove ordinances have helped to an impressive level and should serve both as warning and encouraging prescident for communities like Delta to use in saving their communities.

In town pollution levels remain high...visable on entry from the relatively clean valley corridor. Mountain Village has drainage basin air currents which keep it fairly well scoured as also applies to the San Miguel Canyon corridors. The Mesas...Turkey Creek, Wilson and Hastings, of course, are pristine and some of the healthiest around...provided (as is the deterrent with all resort area lands) that you can afford the price and deal with the planing and building codes beauracratic regulatory hassles.

Beware, however...that the forest service and BLM...now sadly succumbing to the horrendous budgetary dumps for lobbying and miseducation from the herbicide industry, are now blanket spraying even the pristine high mountain meadows of the San Juans and Wilsons with herbicides for thistle and the like. Contact them before relocation and press them for non-chemical management.

Crop burning here is thankfully missing...but then so is the agri-industry...america's number one industrial pollution source.

Hotchkiss-The lure of these small towns in the North Fork area (Hotchkiss, Paonia, Cedaredge, Crawford) is delusional. They remain, despite significant incursion of informed and environmentally competent and insistent settlers in recent years, firmly still in the grips of teeth clenching rednecks who pulled the covers over their heads and cranked up not just their wood burning...but in Hotchkiss's case, myriad coal burning...stoves. The stench of coal smoke (which contains very high formaldehyde and petroleum combustion byproducts besides lung damaging particulates) is disgusting mid winter nights. Its health effects, in terms of a viable community of settlement are unthinkable. The town rises onto the mesa above it to the north, offering some reprieve. The pollution dissipates quickly with distance and is probably acceptable at a mile or two. Offsetting the relative clarity of air in the Hotchkiss perimeter is the ag burning problem spring and summer. As you drive from Delta...indisputedly the "fumes and smoke" capital of the Uncompahgre/ Gunnison Valley...toward Hotchkiss, farmer IQ rises (explanation in the Paonia discussion below) and the burning lessens. The higher up the skirts of Grand Mesa or Fruitland Mesa (across the way) you go, the better the air quality gets because of down-slope drainage winds and parallel to that is an increasing freedom from the "crop duster/ herbicide/ malathion" mania that produces reasoning that makes ag/lawn chemicals appearing on the US Department of Defense Registry of Chemical Warfare Agents (not to mention their listing on the EPA Registry of Known Carcinogens...which doesn't even address other immune destructive qualities...only cancer).. dangerous in the hands of terrorists, but completely harmless loaded into yellow buzzing crop dusters and the pump-tank-fueled wands of teenagers...we guess because they're " 'merican"

Increasingly, as the chemical industry sham in terrifying the public about West Nile Virus (which, in Colorado last year killed less than one one hundredth of one percent of the number of people State licensed and condoned tobacco killed here)...the night time spraying of malathion pesticide is epidemic, spreading out of the Paonia epicenter. Hotchkiss is in the malathion "war zone"...where households and vehicles of those openly opposing the chemical's use are methodically drenched by the pesticide spray truck. The reputation this "malathion corridor" has garnered the area is costing thousands of dollars missing from the cash registers of main street businesses, restaurants and motels in this area as those who know better than to believe its safe simply don't go there any more. Make sure you don't and won't get dosed. Lands around the town, river and large irrigation ditches are the worst...but with chemicals still in the hands of morons, nowhere is really safe.

Austin-Austin possesses, ironically, the singularly most amenable Feng Shui configuration of any community in Western Colorado...if that's a concern for you. The proximity of the massive Grand Mesa to its pack affording protection and the curling flow of the Gunnison river exiting the Black Canyon and flowing sideways across its front doorstep create Chi energy flows of ideal subtle energy nature. This vibrance is not visibly detectable as an historic influence on the character of the community...but more needs investigating here. Actual experiences with air quality and crop spraying are not known at this point. It lies in a very vulnerable position in relation to the legendary crop burning of the North Delta burn corridor...so watch out. Wind currents both up canyon and down...either direction could cause problems. The convenience store and gas station on the highway are owned by some quite questionable and problematic people...the cigarette smoke, fragrances and off road vehicle mania make the facility non-recommendable. Someone could buy this little gold mine out and change it into a health haven and clean up.

Cedaredge- Despite the chronic application of residential herbicides epidemic in the moron classes, this area is relatively clean. The fundamentalist religious infestation here makes social life in the area problematic...for some reason more pronounced than other small isolated bergs...and, of course, since religious circles invariably harbor the real criminals...town politics, especially concerning the graft and corruption around the golf course and surrounding area real estate scams so typical elsewhere, but so glaring here abound. Environmentally, the steep slope location of Cedaredge and the constant down-slope drainage air currents coming from the top of the pristine (except for the choking air pollution of snowmobiles and dirt bikes) Grand Mesa scour the countryside and the town as well. Here, on the edge of developed ag land, crop spraying is minimal in comparison to the flat down-valley areas. Many of the side valley drainage basins are ideal for the EI. The situation on a massive south facing slope is amenable to good passive solar design generally, although altitude here places it into a frigid winter zone a notch or two above the Hotchkiss or Delta area...a sacrifice of temperature for breathability.

Eckert- Similair to Cedaredge (see review), but more embedded in the orchard industry and it's drenching with pesticides. Little actual EI reports are known.

Whitewater-10 miles outside of Grand Junction, but downwind. Probably problematic wood stove pollution indoors, but in fading ag lands location...no direct EI reports available.

Colona-Still in crop sprayed ag lands, but not the toxin levels of Montrose itself.

Mesa- High on the north flanks of Grand Mesa, still in ag land, but fading, no known reports.

Somerset- coal company town...known for dumping raw sewage into the North Fork, tons of coal smoke, what other town has a coal mine loading tower and 6-9 trains a day for an urban core.

Carbondale-a problematical little town of such heartening past now in the death throws of property value pillaging, rampant growth, ag land continued burning...etc. Carbondale has for 30 years hosted the ingeniously buoyant and progressive alternative community that has brought us the Mountain Fair, the veneration of the Dandelion and myriad music and cultural venues for soul-hungry hearts and minds. It could remain if something could be done about speculative real-estate investment, cancerous growth, the crop burning still unfortunately a problem here (though certainly not in a category with Delta and Montrose) . Awareness of herbicides, etc is high here and social pressure produces islands of hope. The community could certainly benefit from a strong activist initiative for community wide bans similar to the work now underway in Ridgway.

Glenwood-Despite its proximity to the engorged Interstate freeway with its concomitant noise and automobile pollution, Glenwood itself remains relatively pristine in terms of air quality...due mostly to the fact that it is a two-conductor wind tunnel...the gorges of the Colorado and Roaring Fork Rivers produce ambient drainage winds which virtually never cease, scouring the berg of what would otherwise certainly be killer pollution. Glenwood is free of the tyranny of the "poor farmer" and his herbicide/pesticide/crop burning industrial pollution...the right to farm is the right to harm...you know. This is because there is no flat land there. Maybe the solution for the ag-infested flatlands of places like Parachute and Rifle is to detonate more thermonuclear devices, erupting the farmlands into fractured cliffs and canyons, making farming itself impossible...whatever it takes.

Paonia-Saddest and most ironic of all our communities. Long the epicenter of environmental sanity in the last 20 years, resulting in a town of 800 supporting three (now down to two) of the region's finest natural food stores (see the Sol Solutions listings on the Smart Shelter Home Page) and what the Dept of Ag in 1991 declared as the area with the highest per capita production of organic food in the nation. The Blue Sage Center for the Arts, relocation of satellite campus for Solar Energy International, home base for Chaco Sandals...great place. But, in a state of huge chemical seige...environmental warfare in the literalist sense...which now engulfs this town.

The local mosquito control district...historically hell bent (probably through the collusion of the Delta-based regional chemical supplier) on drenching public and private properties alike with malathion...long documented to be a killer...was safely converted two years ago by peaceful public invective to the use of much less toxic larvacides...last year undertook a vindictive and now overtly retalitory policy of systematically drenching vehicles and property of those protesting the chemical's use..with the deliberate intent (and in three instances of EI's being forced to leave their homes and move from town) of "nuking the newcomers" until they all leave. The malathion shed itself was blown up in a sham pseudo-demolition ploy by chemical advocates (who managed to dynamite an unoccupied corner, from the outside in plain view of neighbors at a time when nothing was inside...off season) and obviously to discredit environmentally responsible advocates and inflame public support for the chemicals.

The result is that you can drive to Paonia any summer night (but usually Mondays) park on main street for an event at the Paradise Theater or Blue Sage and listen helplessly as the malathion truck's whirrrrr drenches your vehicle...or you, if you happen to be in it...with pesticide...without your knowledge or permission and whether or not you have obtained certification of chemical allergies and disabilities...which, incidentally, make known infliction of these chemicals onto your property or person an official "assault with a deadly weapon"....a felony offense carrying a stiff prison term. One business owner publicly opposed to malathion spraying consistently has the side of their concrete building sprayed...a concrete building...certainly a dangerous estuary of the West Nile Virus. The economic impacts of the town's growing reputation as the "Malathion Capital of Western Colorado" have already plummeted profits in main street businesses. There may still be people in Paonia who think malathion is safe, but the rest of the world knows better and a chunk of them used to eat and entertain here...not anymore.

The Paonia City Park...easily one of the most beautiful in western colorado...is systematically treated with herbicides...watch out.

But aside from all that, the surrounding area and especially the myriad elevated mesas surrounding Paonia are some of the sanest terrain around...except for a bit more proactive education about crop and ditch burning and ramping up of the preferable permaculture alternatives...composting, habitat support, lined ditches, soil remediation, terracing, crop diversity replacing moron monoculture, etc. The terrain leaving Paonia any direction except down river is up. Air quality is generally good, except, of course, in town in winter where the toxic addiction to wood stoves still lingers. Down valley drainage air drifts cleanse some of that, but we have had Alpha Two EI reports of methane content contaminating those winds from the coal mining operations upstream. Smart Shelter spot monitoring of the cleared valley zones do not substantiate that, but they are not of the consistency and duration that would compare to the reporting EI's experiences.

The general public viability to organics and environmental sanity and health make the outlying regions of Paonia one of the most preferable in Colorado. Insistence on interviews with adjoining farmers and neighbors about burning and chemicals prior to relocation or purchase not only provide further assurance for yourself, but also vastly assist the movement to chemical-free biozones (also smoke free)...which are the only real hope we have for the future...to select and target regions like Paonia and the North Fork and enable them into high environmental standards through individual action, social pressure and political activism. If you move to such an area because of these criterion and fail to participate in the political pressures and social value reconstruction regarding chemicals and smoke...you're taking an unwarranted free ride on someone else's back. These islands of sanity did not self generate. Their levels of health came at the expense, sweat and embattlement of your predecessors. Be sure you commit to undertaking the continuance of that legacy as a part of your introduction into the community...which, as we all know, has an impact, no matter how conscientious we are. Be damned sure that's offset with the good works so easy to accomplish...talk to neighbors, vote in mosquito board and town council elections, bring chemical-free zones onto the platforms of every election, press officials to enforce rights to freedom from harm, network with other EI's and responsible residents (much of this is done through organizations like Smart Shelter.

20 years...even 10 years from now...the North Fork could be the state's first Chemical and Burn Free Bio-region. What better way to accumulate a community of like conscience and assure your health and that of your children?

Ridgway-This little berg is the runner-up, neck and neck with the Paonia area for the sanest populaces and policies for chemical sanity in the region. CATPAW, a private citizen organization spearheaded by a couple of very active and knowledgeable resident EIs, has piloted non-chemical irradication and secured a town board decision to cease use of chemical herbicides on all municipal property. This is backed by the timely arrival of a new town manager insistently supportive of chemical-free spaces...and a lawyer. Angry and deceitful retaliation by the Colorado State University Extension Agent (wayne cooley...what a disgusting name...but then, he's a very disgusting guy) and their obvious and now not ever very carefully disguised collusion with Dow Chemical sales agents have produced the hilariously laughable, though sadly true, scenario of the Ridgway Town Marshal...never a zenith of IQ in area law enforcement anyway...stopping a truck with four barrels of vinegar (used as a nontoxic weed treatment) wanting to see their permit for transporting dangerous chemicals. (he then probably went home and drenched his lawn with roundup...his face has complexion colors pretty definitely indicating high level metabolic chemical poisoning...not to mention his body fat overproduction...imagine how much dioxin is stored in that barge.)

But the girls are undeterred (this is, as is so much environmental sanity, mostly a female undertaking). The municipal ban is the first in western colorado...setting a high water mark the elitist towns of Telluride and Crested Butte would be well to lower their noses and follow...having long lost their images as the environmental and mental bastions of sanity and elevation. The reason sanity picked Ridgway is not a mystery...the intelligencia that created early day Telluride...the wood stove bans, the summer festival and music series, etc...long ago all moved to Norwood and Ridgway...we definitely see successional sanity in these experimental communities. Much of the historic and political integrity characterizing young modern Telluride in the 70's (now painfully sold out and abandoned to the Hollywood Telluride of the 90's) came from the fled Aspen refugees that settled there insistent on creating better communities. Having accomplished that, spread their legacy, and succumbed to the toxic greed of the ski and real estate addiction sucking Telluride completely dry of integrity and meaning...have fled to Ridgway. This is a town worth watching...better yet...if you can afford the price...and deal with a much more yuppieised populace than Paonia...go live there. Roll up your sleeves. Help Karen and Jean pull weeds and railroad chemical sanity into existence. Your quest for a better place to live can also propel you into historic legacy through your actions and contributions to creation of this starter chemical-free community. Go do it. Go help.

Watch out for the wood stove smoke...this is a town hosting our best solar providers (see the Smart Shelter Green Pages for referral) Do your own house solar, pressure your wood burning neighbors, support this industry of sanity.

Ag burning is there, but minimal...some ranchers know better, ag land is thankfully disappearing to saner owners. The illusion of the preferential rancher and "poor" farmer is such a farce, especially in the face of advancing permaculture and native landscape technologies. Monoculture (in ranching or in farming) are archaic and dangerous...producing dependency on large expensive machinery and increasing chemicals along with burning. Diversity of species in permaculture eliminates all that and produces profits with less work and infinitely less input. The fact that we are paying taxes to a corrupt government divvying up support payments to failing ranchers and farmers who use the money to create powerful lobbies of insanity at the federal and state levels with the effect of continued agri-welfare dependency and cash flow and then take the rest of those subsidies and mortgage up big machinery that clogs our roads and they can never pay for or spend it on aerial spraying and atv-loaded herbicide rigs which poison us and our food sources (if you're still crazy enough to eat that crap)...and then, when even the welfare fails, insist on carte blanche right to sell out to developers to make a tract home out of their government-propped-up fields...and bango...woodstove smoke and lawn chemcial uses go off the scale (residential herbicide use per acre is 74 times that of the same acreage of farmed land)....all on our dime and certainly to the environment's detriment.

.....we're paying for this. The rock around the neck of our political systems which should bring us progressive legislation and enlightened representatives is the ranching and ag industry itself. They have forever lobbied against growth control and planning. It is the farming and orchard lobby which in the 40's and 50's effectively prevented any sanity in the cancerous expansion of Los Angeles. The result of their hard and swollen hands in the pockets of politics is Los Angeles...the most toxic city in America. All of those ingredients are alive and ticking today evidenced by the horrific collapse of citizen consensus in driving the policies of growth, now bought off by the cattle and farming industry and the greedy bastards whetting their carving knives over what's left of the pristine western colorado legacy...the banking (Wells Fargo runs L.A.) real-estate and development industries.

The geographies and locales (and indigenous and attractive demographies) of Ridgway and Paonia offer the antidotal hopes for exclusion from the destruction Grand Junction and Montrose have already metastasized to the philosophy of the cancer cell :"growth for growth's sake". There is no future at all in arguing with someone who doesn't intuitively read "tilt" to the concept that to be healthy we've always got to grow. If we did that as homosapiens...not stopping growth at adulthood after adolescence...we would collapse our skeletal and muscular systems (not to mention the respiratory, circulatory and immune ones) as we attained statures of several stories and weights of several tons. If you can't intuitively see that sustainability, not growth is the only planning objective that doesn't mean destruction of the entire planet and biosphere...you are certainly on the wrong road...and arguably spending time on the wrong web site.

The only short to medium term hope for sanity lies in the selective identification of bio-regions like Paonia and Ridgway as epicenters for the sane...giving them a public identity enabling them to become attractors for people invested in sustainability, EI aversion and sanity, along with capacity to supersede greed as the bottom line for economic growth...declare them chemical-free zones...establish the EI Standard (see the resource files on this site) as the criterion for health decisions...ramp up solar and ramp down burning...do public education and mandates for permaculture to replace ranching and monoculture ag...enable diversity as the income and life-comodity sources provided bio-regionally...outlaw and irradicate off-area corporate intrusions (chains and big boxers)...insist on locally based banking...etc.

30 years from now, if we do that, towns like Paonia and Ridgway can be the citadels of sanity and health long after the Grand Junctions and Montroses have gone to hell...a trip for which we see they are already vehemently constructing their own handcarts...even as we speak.

An aside, but maybe an important one...is the geothermal reservoir underlying the Ridgway Valley...already tapped and developed in Ouray...which may well figure in future energy development..not time here to get into that one...but a consideration if you're thinking about Ridgway.

Crystal River Valley- Gorgeous, clean, pristine.

Crawford- An irony here....this attractive, sleepy, dream-setting little berg in the quiet back-reaches of Delta County high country would appear pristine. Winter reconnaissance attempting to locate wood-stove free air as a breathable haven found the air pollution here some of the worst encountered. Its a puzzle. The town sits on a ridge and should be scoured from two or three directions...but apparently isn't...and several deliberate and precise reconnaissance night runs were made in mid December/January. Real estate expenditures in the town itself are definitely not recommended. The country side around Crawford is nearly ideal...high enough in elevation to minimize herbicides and crop dusting...because of the fringe location to burn-farmer, sodbuster land...fairly free of ag burning...though the ranchers still torch/torture their ditches so watch out. The chill/ cool wind slip from the tall West Elk Range keep the air here fresh...albiet really cold.