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Show A-18 Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, February 1-4, 2020 The Park Record Meetings and agendas More dogs on Main TO PUBLISH YOUR PUBLIC NOTICES AND AGENDAS, PLEASE EMAIL CLASSIFIEDS@PARKRECORD.COM Observing climate change AGENDA Summit County Board of Health Meeting February 3, 2020 4:00 – 5:30 PM Summit County Health Department 650 Round Valley Drive Park City, Utah 84060 PUBLIC MEETING 4:00 – 5:30 1. Welcome and Approval of Minutes (4:00 – 4:05) 2. Public Comment (4:05 – 4:10) 3. Directors Report (Rich, 4:10 – 4:15) 4. Coronavirus Update (Carolyn, 4:15 – 4:25) 5. Air Quality Report (Trevor, 4:25 – 4:35) 6. Water Source Protection Report (Nate, 4:35 – 4:45) 7. Community Health Assessment Update (Phil, 4:45 – 4:50) 8. Legislative Update (All, 4:50 – 5:05) 9. Possible Board Retreat Discussion (All, 5:05 – 5:15) 10. UALBH (Marc, 5:15 – 5:20) 11. Other Board Items (5:20 – 5:30) 12. Adjourn Continued from A-14 Picasso runs free dreds, if not more — no blow or gnash proved to be fatal. In his years of running free over the rugged terrain of the Basin, no stumble or fall left him too hobbled to survive. Picasso, to be sure, is a charmed old horse, which might be as much to credit for his popularity as anything. He has roamed in the wild for almost three decades, and it shows — his hide is stitched with the scars and swipes from other stallions; his face is thinning. And yet, Picasso persevered, wild and free. But he is a smart horse, too, and one that was born with the instincts to survive. “It really is survival of the fittest out there,” said Nadja Rider, a frequent observer and photographer of the horses who lives in Craig. Her Facebook page, Wild Horses of Sand Wash Basin, has more than 200,000 followers. Picasso, predictably, is the favorite. “If the horses aren’t born with the right instincts, they don’t make it,” Rider said. The horses survive on the watering holes and forage of the Basin. Their digestive systems allow them to get by on relatively low-quality feed, Smith said, and they can travel easily and quickly between water and food sources. And wild horses, in general, don’t have a 1natural predator. Their size, speed and tendency to live in herds make them unlikely prey. “Even an injured horse is very difficult for something like a coyote to take down,” Smith said. For an old horse like Picasso, survival means having a good hiding spot in bad weather. He has a knack, Rider and the other observers say, for finding safe shelter in the gullies and washes of the Basin. In the winter months, he’s unlikely to be spotted at all. Earlier this month, Rider posted a picture from the Basin of the pinto Michelangelo, a grandson of Picasso. He was dozing as he stood on a south-facing slope, a thicket of junipers behind him to block the wind. The mustang looked regal, his coloring reminiscent of his famous grandfather. But the picture was another moment of survival in the middle of a harsh winter, with months to go before warmth. “Most people have a romantic notion of their life,” Rider said. “It’s really not that romantic. It’s a tough life for Picasso, for all the wild horses.” By Tom Clyde Picasso, a striking figure but considered to be a hand or two shorter than the tallest stallions, apparently learned another lesson early. “There are some stallions that will literally battle to the death,” Rider said. “The smarter ones just know when to bow out,” she said, a lesson Picasso did not forget, even if he had a little fight left inside him. The battle for Spirit Dancer Scott Wilson arrived at the Basin for the first time on April 29, 2018. Looking back on the trip, the photographer from Greenwood Village still can’t believe his luck. He spent two days following the stallions and mares, and caught a stunning moment of two mustangs in the height of battle, clashing at the throat. It was a good trip, worth the fivehour drive from home. As he headed out of the Basin, he spotted the flash of a painted stallion out of the corner of his eye, tussling with another mustang. “I had no idea I was watching Picasso at the time,” Wilson said, “but I got out of my car and just shot this scene to death.” He posted the pictures on his Facebook page, including one of Picasso charging full steam ahead, his scars and muscle and flowing mane on full display. Wilson captioned the picture, “MUSTANG,” unaware, at the time, of the fame he had encountered. “But suddenly, from nowhere, all of this Picasso fan club emerged,” he said, “and I kind of realized — I struck gold with this picture.” “I think Picasso is the epitome of the wild American mustang. It speaks to the nation in that way. It’s what much of that wild, raw energy America has, and it just lives in this amazing horse. And I think people just want to feel a part of that.” What Wilson had witnessed was a glimpse of what might have been Picasso’s final great battle. Wild horses congregate in bands, led by a stallion, such as Picasso, and joined by a mare or two and their yearlings. Picasso, who has enough offspring to fill a spreadsheet — Rider keeps a database on her computer — last had a goodsized band around 2014, Mosbey said, when he was running with four mares, including his beloved Mingo. But Picasso lost the band, and was cast off on his own, a familiar outcome for an old stallion, even a legend. He wandered alone until the spring of 2018 when he struck up a romance with a pretty young mare named Spirit Dancer. “He lost his mind over this young filly,” Rider said. Then came Voodoo, a chestnut mustang named after a Steamboat Springs ski run. The two stallions battled for weeks over Spirit Dancer. Wilson, the photographer who captured Picasso and Voodoo in the heat of battle, watched a slice of the struggle. “Photos don’t lie,” Wilson said. “But what you don’t see behind that is the absolutely day-by-day grueling, wearing down that went on...fighting just takes its toll.” Picasso, broken down and not ready to die, stepped away from the fight, leaving his young love behind. By the end of 2018, Voodoo was spotted with a broken leg and was euthanized. The following year, Spirit Dancer, after delivering a foal, was found too sick and frail to stand, and she was euthanized, too. ‘They lived and died wild. They were free’ The Picasso followers know the end is near. The question this winter is whether the old man will see another spring. In late 2018, Picasso was, by most accounts, feeble and weak, barely skin and bones before the thick of winter arrived. Rider assumed that Picasso would never be seen again. Months passed without a sighting. In the early spring, Rider was visiting the Grand Tetons in Wyoming when she received a message from a friend in the Basin: They found Picasso. “He was very much alive,” Rider said. She last spotted Picasso in November, near Highway 318, and walked him back into the Basin. Rider worries about the horses wandering near the highway traffic and has pushed for the Colorado Department of Transportation to build a fence along the road. However it ends for Picasso, Rider will be at peace. Over the years, there have been calls for Picasso to be adopted, to be sheltered from the weathering of living in the wild. But Rider knows the wild is where Picasso belongs. “So many people have wanted to remove him,” Rider said. “But he needs to die out there.” “To any one of them that die,” Mosbey said, “You know what? Just be thankful. They lived and died wild. They were free.” When Picasso does die, it won’t be the end of an era, said Sharkey, the Canadian broadcaster who drove from Ottawa and back to see the famed horse. “No horse lover worth their salt would call it that,” Sharkey said. Because when Picasso is gone, Sharkey said, his legacy will carry on, in the attitude and appearance and instinct of his generations of offspring. His fans will return to the Basin, where they might spot a painted mustang, free as the day he was born, galloping toward a watering hole or charging at a taller stallion, and they might see the old pinto one more time. The glacier came off my roof the other night. There’s a shed dormer that holds the snow. The upper roof is steeper and snow slides down to the dormer, and there it sits. Gradually, it creeps forward, building up a layer of ice at the edge. It will cantilever out a couple of feet. Sometimes it breaks off, and other times, the ice warps. After a while it curves downward until the ice curl reaches down to the roof below, a perfect half circle about 3 feet in diameter. Through the years, it’s been interesting watching the different ways the snow builds up and then creeps forward from the dormer. Sometimes there are huge icicles, and then the glacier curls forward and the icicles end up pointing horizontally at the bathroom window. The only constant is that it doesn’t slide off with every storm like it was supposed to with the metal roof. When you hear geologists talking about glaciers carving the Cottonwood canyons, it seems implausible. Then the ice on the roof provides a scale model of glaciers in action. The glacier broke loose the other night at 3:05 a.m. I know that because when it came crashing down, it shook the house and woke me out of a sound sleep. Because it had curled all the way around to meet the roof below, it came off in a rolling motion. That’s better than all the weight smacking the lower roof all at once, but it still was enough to rattle the teacups. I discovered my maximum heart rate, too. The dogs slept through it. They didn’t notice the house shaking or the sound of half a ton of ice crashing down. Sometimes a car will drive by very late at night on a road across the river. It’s a quarter mile or more away, but the headlights will shine in the bedroom window, casting shadows that dance across the bedroom wall. The headlights will send the dogs into red alert mode, and they have to run and bark at every window for about fifteen minutes of sheer panic. They race up and down the stairs until they are sure the perimeter is secure. But a concussion on the roof that shakes the house? Didn’t bat an eye. There’s something wrong about mud puddles in the driveway in February.” This has been a very strange winter. There haven’t been more than a hand full of nights below zero, and even those weren’t extremely cold. The coldest I’ve seen so far is -5, which isn’t cold enough to put the earflaps down on my Elmer Fudd hat. My cousin and his wife have moved back into his parents’ old house up the street from mine. We got talking the other day about how much harder hard the winters were 50 or 60 years ago. We weren’t completely sure if the winters 60 years ago seemed harder because we were whiny little kids, or if things have really changed enough to notice. Relatively speaking, the snow was deeper when we were only three feet tall. The snow removal equipment we have now is all substantially bigger than the little Ford 8n tractor we used back then, so the effort involved in keeping things opened up is definitely less. Everybody has four-wheel drive and UDOT more or less paves the highway with salt. I never feel snowed-in anymore. So it’s hard to make a direct comparison. Maybe it just seems like the winters are less threatening now. Except that we both have actual records of temperatures, and memories of fences that disappeared under the snow. Temperatures of -20 were normal in January. The coldest I’ve recorded is -35, and the ten days or so on either side of New Years often didn’t get much above 0. Then the January Thaw would come in and warm things up to a blessed 40 degrees for a week, just in time for another brutal cold spell during the first half of February. I used to cultivate a layer of permafrost on the road to my house all winter. It’s easier to plow if the gravel is under the ice layer. It used to stay in place, rock solid, until early March. The permafrost in the driveway is already gone at the end of January. Mud season lasts all year now. There’s no getting around it. The climate has changed. We’ve been using the atmosphere as a dumping ground since the industrial revolution began. The carbon dioxide is invisible, so nobody gave it any thought. After 200 years, it appears to have made a difference. For some reason, the courageous decision to ban plastic bags at our local Walgreens hasn’t reversed it. I don’t really miss -35 nights. But there’s something wrong about mud puddles in the driveway in February. This ought to be the core issue of the next election, but don’t count on it. Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. sunday in the Park By Teri Orr The art of storytelling — on and off the screen... Outside of Sundance — my life isn’t ever like this... I saw so many personal heroes in the flesh this festival I did have to gut check, take a deep long breath and be reminded this is not normal. It is extraordinary. I met so many new people I am dizzy from trying to remember how they connect to each other — to the festival — to me — and all the next chapters to come. Being a journalist has allowed me more privileges than all the other jobs I have ever had. It is the golden ticket that serves as entree — even temporarily — into worlds that are foreign and exotic — gritty and scary authentic. For the past 10 days I have been weaving between conversations and dinner parties and panel discussions and scribbling sideways writing in the dark — trying to absorb all the nuances involved in the process. Or “the art of making art” ... as Stephen Sondheim proclaimed decades ago in his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Sunday in the Park with George,” based upon Georges Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Seeing that performance in New York City was reason enough — in the late ’80s — for me to change the original name of this column from — Strike a Vein — to Sunday in the Park. This year I shared conversations on a city bus ride from Main Street to the Eccles Theater, in the Owl Bar at Sundance Resort in front of the crackling fire, at the tiny — really tiny — six-person bar inside Cafe Terigo, at dinner parties in homes high in the hills inside and out of the city limits, with some conservative folks but mostly with large gatherings of out-of-state liberals who passionately remind us there is much hard work to be done. The panel, “Power of Story: Just Art,” was like a dream for me and featured my artistic heroes. We were in the room where Lin-Manuel Miranda was rapping all about “being in the room where it happens” from his seminal work, “Hamilton.” He was joined in conversation with dissident Chinese visual artist Ai Weiwei, at the festival with a film he did about injustice in Mexico. And they were joined by director/ visual artist “The Lion (hearted) King” Julie Taymor talking about her current project — the film “The Glorias” — about Gloria Steinem. And then later in the week I saw real-life Gloria with Julie on the Eccles stage. Honestly, it was full sensory overload. The question always floating around the festival is the “Sophie’s Choice” one ... which one of the films was your favorite? Impossible to answer ... to choose. I try to parse it down and pick my favorite film for cinematography, or storytelling, or great acting. And though I have not seen — by Sundance standards — many films this year — maybe 10 — that is 10 full times more films than I see on average weeks the rest of the year. For me — the most important film was “The Dissident,” about the murder of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Oscar-winning director (“Icarus”) Bryan Fogel started on the story the very day after it was confirmed Khashoggi had been murdered. The web he reveals involves the same web we all use to communicate and the same one that revealed Jeff Bezos (of Amazon fame, of course, but more importantly for this story — owner of The Washington Post) was having an affair — that leak was ALL manipulated by the Saudis. It is a spying and manipulation of information done in the dark recesses of the web. The film reveals these operatives as “flies.” And they were countered by the good guys, the “bees.” And together they quickly influence what you are and are not seeing online. This film should scare every thinking person. The unimaginable wealth in the Middle East and the means the rulers will go to maintain their power and influence and money — giant piles of money. So much money the filmmaker suggested in the Q-and-A in the tiny screening room at Sundance Resort that perhaps they are the holders of the missing “Salvator Mundi,” the painting of Jesus Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. That was sold anonymously in auction in 2017 in New York by Christie’s. ... And then — it disappeared. I left the screening realizing all I did not know about the state of the world, the internet, who controls what I see and how the murder — by thugs — of a world-respected journalist can take place in broad daylight inside an embassy. And how that bonesawed body completely disappeared while his fiancee stood for hours and then days waiting outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul for him to return with a marriage license so they could live happily ever after. This was The Film — this festival. It was co-produced by part-time Parkite Jim Swartz. For years my favorite Sundance party has been with folks I was introduced to by a former East Coast horsewoman who became a Montana horsewoman and who has a place here and has the most amazing dinner parties with volunteers — who she opens her home to during the festival. I met her through two of those volunteers at the Eccles theater more than a decade ago. She, in turn, introduced me to folks who mostly live on the East Coast but have homes in California and Texas also. The evening — with a crackling fire in a comfy log home — included the heads of networks who were drinking fine wine out of red solo cups. The banter was about the impeachment, by people, currently covering that story. When I left, there was a parting gift, a signed memoir by Frank Bennack, former CEO of the Hearst Corporation, and chairman emeritus of the Lincoln Center, Presbyterian Hospital and Metropolitan Opera Company. Frank started out in Texas in a hardscrabble way. He became a journalist when the acting thing seemed unlikely to stick. His book is titled “Leave Something on the Table.” On a summer night — not too long ago — a few of us sat on the wide deck of Frank’s home overlooking Park City and he toasted the night by stealing a quote from centuries past. ... “Confusion to the enemy!” he proclaimed in his authoritative deep voice as he raised his glass. And I knew ghosts of all those journalists he had watched and those he had shaped were raising glasses with him. So I raise mine this week to the gods of the festival who bring this disparate group of film lovers together and allow us to make friendships and discuss world issues — for years and years. Conversations that happen in front of fires and on summer porches. And on Sundays in the Park... Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the Park City Institute, which provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts. |