.

For days after the Waldo Canyon fire, my Jeep smelled like smoke. I couldn’t get the stink out.

The entire Pikes Peak Region is experiencing the same phenomenon. It can’t shake the stink of the fire.

Images on the national news of forests and homes burning led to widespread cancellations at area tourist-related businesses.

Now we’re all being urged to take “staycations.”

Terry Sullivan

Experts say if we all explore our own backyard, we can help our economy.

And we’ll have fun.

I asked Terry Sullivan, longtime tourism guru, if staycations can really help.

“Absolutely,” Terry said. “And there’s a lot we can do by inviting our friends and relatives to visit, too.”

Terry offered this staycation tip:

“One of my favorite things is to get up early in the morning and take a family up the Pikes Peak Highway,” he said.

But he only pays to go to three reservoirs — Crystal Creek and North and South Catamount — where he stops and fixes breakfast.

“I bring premade pancakes and either bring a grill or use the barbecue pits, with caution of course,” he said.

“There’s nothing like having breakfast and looking up on Pikes Peak.”

He’s even been lucky enough to have friends catching fish while he’s cooking breakfast.

My favorite staycation also involves the mountain.

My wife, Cary, and I spent a morning riding down the highway with Pikes Peak Mountain Bike Tours and then had lunch along Fountain Creek at Wines of Colorado in Cascade. Epic!

We also had a great staycation exploring Victor and Cripple Creek. We spent the night in a haunted room at the Victor Hotel, rode the Cripple Creek & Victor Narrow Gauge Railroad and we lost an hour wandering the Victor Cemetery. (We’re strange like that.)

Our staycation list also includes rafting the Arkansas River, a day trip to Green Mountain Falls and hiking at the Crags.

Susan Edmondson, executive director, Bee Vradenburg Foundation and staycation expert

My friend, Susan Edmondson, had tons of staycation ideas involving the arts.

“If you can’t find something fun, brilliant, mind-blowing and great for the whole family in our local arts scene, then you’re just not looking,” Susan exclaimed. (She exclaims a lot.)

Her list includes taking the kids to Millibo Art Theatre’s “Double Bubble” Ice Cream Theatre.

Susan also highly recommends catching James Turrell’s “Trace Elements: Light Into Space” opening Saturday at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Susan called it ”a mind-blowing installation light sculpture.” And she exclaimed: “This is a must-see for everyone, and I really mean everyone.”

And she recommends Theatreworks‘ “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” at Rock Ledge Ranch, Aug. 2-26, which she described as “Shakespeare in a spectacular setting.”

Susan also touted all the free concerts in the great outdoors pretty much every night of the week – about 125 concerts total throughout the region in the summer. For a great downloadable concert guide go to COPPeR.

Finally, friend Warren Epstein, who seems like he’s on permanent vacation, urged folks to consider an overnight in the Cliff House in Manitou Springs (he loves the signature suites), a visit to the Penny Arcade and maybe a nightcap at the Keg.

“Manitou, especially, caters to people wanting something unusual and unique,” Warren said. “You’ll get a real vacation experience.”

Here’s some other staycation ideas and coupons from area attractions and other businesses:

To get more information from the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau, follow this link.

Click here for Manitou Springs area information.

You can find more deals at the Pikes Peak Country Attractions group.

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HELP THE PIKES PEAK REGION SHAKE THE STINK is a post from: Side Streets

Russ Wolfe, owner of the Flying W Ranch, surveys damage from the Waldo Canyon fire. The mosaic in front of him was part of the Ute Theater in downtown Coloraodo Springs. He salvaged much of the theater to build his western steakhouse in 1969.

Russ Wolfe groaned and shook his head Monday as he surveyed the still-smoldering ruins of his Flying W Ranch, where he’d spent 60 years serving chuckwagon dinners in amid an Old West village and singing cowboys.

“The only thing that’s left is the parking lot,” Wolfe, 87, said in a quiet voice as a light rain fell. “Everything else went down the tube.”

A Flying W Ranch employee snapped this photo while escaping the Waldo Canyon fire as it exploded above Mountain Shadows on June 26.

The Flying W was the first casualty when the Waldo Canyon fire exploded on June 26 and roared down the foothills and into Colorado Springs, eventually destroying 346 homes in Mountain Shadows.

Flaming embers blew over Christmas Rock, which overlooks the ranch, quickly followed by a wall of flames that devoured the historic Flying W, a working cattle ranch and beloved tourist attraction since 1953, known for its barbecue brisket, baked beans and cowboy biscuits served on tin plates.

Flames destroyed the 1,400-seat dining hall. The pavilion and outdoor stage were reduced to rubble, the winter steakhouse an ugly heap of blackened debris.

View photo gallery

Charred concrete foundations or blackened ground are all that remain of a dozen or so buildings that made up his western town.

The biscuit hut looks like it was hit by mortars.

The little church — site of Sunday services and weddings for decades with stained glass from the old Nolan Funeral Home in Colorado Springs — is gone.

The steel beams that held it up were left deformed by the intense heat of the fire.

Thin ribbons of black ash snake along the brick walkways — remnants of firehoses dropped by retreating firefighters.

The old jail was ruined, although its century-old steel cage, which housed Manitou Springs criminals until 1970, remained intact.

The three-story pueblo is gone. Same for the village assembly hall, log cabin, schoolhouse and assorted shops.

The Flying W, the backdrop for countless vacation photos and wedding videos and host of corporate meetings, is utterly unrecognizable.

The destruction was so complete and disorienting that Wolfe had to think hard at times to recall exactly where he was on the property.

“I’m not sure what building that was,” he said a couple times as we picked our way through the debris of the ranch. “I’ll have to get a map.”

Was it as bad as he had feared, I asked him?

“Worse,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, waving his hands in resignation. “There’s nothing to save.”

Yet he remained unemotional and even managed a smile and a chuckle in the face of the staggering devastation.

I asked Wolfe how he controlled his emotions.

After all, this was a place he’d started building in 1948 with his wife, Marian, after he’d returned from service in the Navy at the end of World War II and they joined her parents on their ranch.

A year earlier, Marian’s parents, Don and Minnie Wilson, had sold their place in El Dorado, Kan., near Wichita, and bought the old Douglas homestead, a sprawling 6,000-acre ranch that stretched north from Glen Eyrie almost to what is now Peregrine and east to what we know as Centennial Boulevard.

Marian and Russ Wolfe in the 1950s.

In those days, it was all cattle and horses and rattlesnakes with few trees and fewer people.

“I came here in 1948 to learn the cattle business and I started cooking beans in 1953,” Wolfe said in his customary self-depricating humor.

Actually, the Flying W evolved in those fiveyears.

To supplement ranch income, they started boarding horses and offering trail rides, which were popular with area residents and tourists.

Soon, an evening trail ride was offered and Marian cooked a dinner for riders, which they served around a campfire.

Before long, Wolfe said, more folks were coming for dinner than to ride horses. Instead of just twice a week, campfire dinners were served seven nights a week.

“We started having so many people eating that we got rid of the horses and started cooking,” Wolfe wrote in a 1985 family history.

He hired students from Colorado College to sing campfire songs and the Flying W Ranch Chuckwagon Suppers and Western Shows was born.

A shelter was built for the guests and then a kitchen. In 1957, he introduced the Flying W Wranglers, who became the trademark entertainers at the ranch with a family-friendly blend of humor and western music.

When customers started showing up early for dinner, Wolfe realized he needed to keep them entertained.

He built an Old West trading post.

Soon, he had built an entire western village filled with antiques gathered from across the region.

The winter steakhouse, for example, opened in 1969 with parts salvaged from the Ute Theater before it was demolished on Pikes Peak Avenue in downtown Colorado Springs.

Wolfe reassembled its ticket booth, chairs, wishing well in the lobby and chandeliers.

The Picketwire Bar inside was an 1880s relic he salvaged from southeastern Colorado.

Russ Wolfe tends the Picketwire Bar in the winter steakhouse.

The church boasted pews from an old Episcopal Church in Manitou, a pot-bellied stove from Del Norte  and the piano from a beer hall in Kansas.

The schoolhouse was an authentic 1880s building Wolfe saved from demolition, numbering each board and photographing every aspect so it could be moved, piece-by-piece, and reassembled on the ranch.

The drug store featured parts of the old Sloan’s Drug at Tejon Street and Platte Avenue downtown while the soda fountain came out of the Sweet Shop at Nevada Avenue and Bijou Street.

Wolfe said few of the antiques could be saved. The fire swept in too quickly, with too much fury.

The only buildings that appeared untouched were Marian’s Library, a tribute to his late wife who died in 1999 at age 75, an underground Indian kiva and a teepee erected nearby.

Also intact is the old Miner’s Train, a kiddee ride which chugged through a tunnel blasted by a couple Cripple Creek miners Wolfe hired.

But the disaster is so overwhelming Wolfe can’t imagine the Flying W will ever be the same.

“The fire really did . . . everything bad,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling. “I mean everything.”

He has a hard time imaging how it will look or even where to start.

The exterior of the winter steakhouse, built with parts salvaged from the Ute Theater in downtown Colorado Springs.

“It’s going to be a lot of work,” he said. “It’s going to take a long while.”

His immediate thought is to erect a single building where he can serve his chuckwagon dinners and have a stage for the Flying W Wranglers and a place for meetings and weddings.

“We’ll try to get something back,” Wolfe said. “But I don’t think we’ll rebuild the western village. I doubt it very much if the train will run again.”

But Wolfe will try.

It’s his nature. He said he refuses to give into grief or anger or frustration at his loss.

The Waldo Canyon fire created an inferno so intense a truck and trailer were reduced to rubble.

And he is buoyed by the 15,000 emails and phone calls the Flying W has received  from people nationwide who have fond memories of the place.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “It’s tough to see all that stuff gone.

“But I can’t walk away from that situation. I can’t leave it like that. All burned up.”

Wolfe said he will attack the fire the way he’s always faced problems in life.

“Sure, it would be easier to walk away,” he said. “But I won’t do that.

“I’ve always said when you are confronted with two paths in life, you should always go the way it takes the most effort on your part. It will work out the best.”

So he focuses on how he can salvage what remains and rebuild within the insurance boundaries.

“It’s not something you can solve in a hurry,” he said. “It may take a couple years.

“But I just keep thinking how I can make it better. Our goal was to preserve western heritage. We’re going to rebuild. So I just keep smiling and go on.”

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Follow this link to take a tour of the charred remains of the Flying W Ranch with Russ Wolfe.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

AS FLYING W SMOLDERS, RUSS WOLFE PERSEVERES is a post from: Side Streets

The Patty Jewett Neighborhood Association created the Art on the Run series of Tuesday evening concerts along the Shooks Run Trail as a way to surprise passers-by and enhance the quality of life in the neighborhood northeast of downtown Colorado Springs. Photo by R. Scott Rappold, The Gazette

Whew! I was afraid I’d been too slow to catch “Art on the Run.”

But as it turns out, there will be two more chances to see the unique celebration of art and open space.

If you haven’t read about it, this summer the Patty Jewett Neighborhood Association has surprised folks riding and walking the Shooks Run Trail with music on Tuesday evenings.

They called it “Art on the Run” because the concerts were staged along the trail, which traces the path of the Santa Fe Railway tracks that sliced a diagonal path through the neighborhood northeast of downtown Colorado Springs.

The tracks evolved into the trail, now a beloved feature of the neighborhood.

Public art is also loved by the neighborhood association, which it has expressed by creating a locomotive-themed bench in a pocket park along the trail.

The bench, built in partnership with Concrete Couch, the public art nonprofit created by  Steve Wood of Manitou Springs, was designed to alert passers-by they were in a unique neighborhood.

The Art on the Run program is an extension of that thinking, said Amy Triandiflou, PJNA president.

“Patty Jewett really is a neat community,” Triandiflou said. “The Art on the Run event really gives us a voice for what we care about: community, art, music and the trail.”

She said the association board came up with the idea after learning the Pikes Peak Community Foundation was offering “ingenuity grants” to encourage people to use art to enhance the quality of life in the region.

“One of the ideas was to create spontaneous performance art along Shooks Run Trail,” she said.

A goal of the Patty Jewett Neighborhood Association's Art on the Run project was to surprise folks walking and riding the Shooks Run Trail. Photo by R. Scott Rappold, The Gazette

So the neighborhood partnered with the Colorado Springs Conservatory to locate artists, musicians and performers. In exchange, Patty Jewett is donating its $750 grant to the conservatory for scholarships. A neighborhood business, Dogtooth Coffee, donated bottled water.

The first concert, on June 12, featured a bluegrass band and the second, a week later, a jazz trio. They performed along the trail between Columbia and San Miguel streets, east of Corona Street.

“We had 150 people the first night,” Triandiflou said. “And about 90 came the second night.

“It was so great to see people excited about it.”

I was bummed because the series was scheduled to end July 3 before I could attend.

But due to the Waldo Canyon fire and some bad weather, the last two events were postponed.

Triandiflou said her board will decide this week when to reschedule those performances before the neighborhood’s Aug. 11 annual party.

Watch the Patty Jewett Neighborhood’s Facebook page for the new dates.

“It was so great,” Triandiflou said. “I love it that neighbors and the community embraced it.”

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SLOW DOWN AND CATCH ‘ART ON THE RUN’ is a post from: Side Streets

The Prospect Lake Beach is open again for swimming after being closed two years due to city budget cuts.

After a couple weeks of fire-induced stress, I needed some beach time.

I got it Thursday at Prospect Lake.

That’s right, the swimming beach is re-opened after being closed two years due to city budget cuts. And it’s as good as ever.

The Eni R. Jaspersen Beach House is gleaming with new paint, renovated locker rooms and showers.

New sand was hauled in along the waterfront. Picnic tables were hauled out of the water.

Life guards are in the towers and it’s like old times.

It was quiet Thursday after a busy Fourth of July at the beach. Megan Quiggle was enjoying the water with her kids. They had come from Minnesota for a family reunion.

Some of the family wanted to fish. Others wanted to swim. Prospect Lake in Memorial Park was the place they could do both.

“It’s really nice,” she said.

Samantha Griffin was catching some rays on a beach towel near the water.

A west-side resident, Samantha said she bought a summer pool pass from the YMCA, which is operating the Prospect Lake Beach, as well as the re-opened Monument Valley Pool, Portal Pool and the Wilson Ranch Pool under a contract with the city. The Y also operates the city-owned Cottonwood Creek and Memorial Park recreation centers.

“I think it’s awesome,” Samantha said, adding that her 4-year-old daughter also enjoys the beach. “The bath house is nice and the life guards do a really good job.”

That sentiment echoed across the 400-foot-long beach, including from the Swimmin’ Women, a group that has been swimming at the beach for decades.

Rita Rosenberg, Trudy White, Ursula Kahkoska, Rosemarie Belz and Chris Conboy

No kidding. Trudy White started bringing her kids to the Prospect Lake Beach in 1968. Several knew Eni Jaspersen, namesake of the beach house.

Trudy and the rest of the Swimmin’ Women — Rita Rosenberg,  Ursula Kahkoska, Rosemarie Belz and Chris Conboy — praised the Y and its aquatics director, Marti Wallner, for getting the beach back in shape after two years of neglect and vandalism took a heavy toll.

“We come almost every day,” Rosemarie said with a big smile. “The Y is doing a great job.”

They especially praised the Y for changing its fee structure at the beach to recognize the economics of the residents of the surrounding Hillside neighborhood.

“It was way too expensive,” Chris said. “It was $7 for adults, $5 for kids and $25 for families. Now it’s $5 for adults, $3 for kids and $15 for families.”

To my eye, the buoys of the swimming area need to be expanded. And city crews need to get in and mow some weeds along the fence. But otherwise it looks great.

And the Swimmin’ Women want everyone to know it’s a great place for families.

Just don’t take the picnic table in the southwest corner. The Swimmin’ Women had it fished from the water.

So they called dibs!

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Follow this link to the pool website of the YMCA of the Pikes Peak Region.

Here’s the YMCA brochure for all its swimming facilities.

To read about the Prospect Lake Beach during its closure, click here.

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LIFE’S A BEACH, WITH SHADE, AT PROSPECT LAKE is a post from: Side Streets

"A City Beautiful Dream - The 1912 Vision for Colorado Springs" is the latest in a series of regional history books published by the Pikes Peak Library District

As Colorado Springs studies loosening the reins on developers by expediting the process for getting their plans approved, I thought I’d look at how the planning process evolved.

Funny thing. The planning department overhaul comes  on the 100th anniversary of the City Council’s adoption of its first formal plan for the future development.

In fact, the Pikes Peak Library District has published a book: “A City Beautiful Dream – The 1912 Vision for Colorado Springs.”

It’s the 10th book in the library’s fascinating regional history series. (It’s $14.95 and available at the library, the Pioneers Museum and ClausenBooks.com.)

The project started — doesn’t every government effort — with a consultant hired by the City Council in late 1911 for $2,000 to evaluate the city’s design.

Charles Mulford Robinson, photo courtesy Pikes Peak Library District

At the time, Charles Mulford Robinson had established a reputation for designing modern cities. So he got the job.

Tim Scanlon, a former Springs city planner who now consults with Shooks Run Research, described  Robinson as being ahead of his peers in envisioning how cities might be built.

“Robinson advanced the practice of comprehensive planning . . . that continues today,” Scanlon wrote in an introduction to the book.

Though Robinson plan never was fully implemented, several of his recommendations are evident today, said Tim Blevins, the library’s special collections manager who coordinated publication of the book.

This 1904 map of Colorado Springs shows the downtown grid consultant Charles Mulford Robinson detested as well as the railroad lines he blamed for polluting the air and inhibiting movement due to their poor location and at-grade street crossings.

“We use the plan quite a bit in special collections to answer reference questions,” Blevins said.

Robinson observed the strengths and weaknesses of Colorado Springs, based on research he conducted 1905-1911 for two separate reports that were the basis of his 1912 report: “A General Plan for the Improvement of Colorado Springs.”

Issued three years after the death of founder Gen. William Jackson Palmer, Robinson’s plan was critical of some of Palmer’s key design features: the wide streets and downtown grid.

Robinson said the Springs should design its streets to enhance its railroad stations, hotels and parks as its three obvious “focal points in the life and activity of the community.”

But he said Palmer’s “tiresome” grid did nothing to enhance community, calling it “as commonplace as Philadelphia’s or Chicago’s.”

He advocated disrupting the unimaginative grid by varying the widths of streets.

Wide roads would be thoroughfares while more narrow roads would discourage horses and buggies and become quiet residential streets.

His plan forcefully advocated building parks and playground and ridding the city of air pollution by imagining electric trains instead of smoky steam engines.

Consultant Charles Mulford Robinson urged the City Council to rid Monument Creek of those "wretched shacks" as seen in this photo looking south from the Bijou Street bridge. Photo courtesy the Pikes Peak Library District.

He advocated a height limit on buildings downtown and ridding the city of at-grade railroad crossings.

Wonder what he’d think of the city today and efforts to muzzle city planners? Hmm.

Eliminating the Sante Fe Station, top, on East Pikes Peak Avenue, was one of consultant Charles Mulford Robinson's recommendations. It took a route through the east side of Colorado Springs, spreading smoke and causing too many transportation delays with its numerous at-grade street crossings. Robinson urged turning the Denver & Rio Grande station, bottom, into a "union station" and consolidating all train travel in it.

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EVEN IN 1912 CITY PLANNING WAS IMPORTANT is a post from: Side Streets

Dozens of homes on Courtney Drive in the center of the photo were burned to the ground by the Waldo Canyon fire on June 26, 2012, as the inferno exploded down the foothills and into the Colorado Springs neighborhood of Mountain Shadows.

On Friday night, June 29, I drove home as I have thousands of times since I bought my house in Rockrimmon in 1997. But this commute was like none other.

The last time I drove this route it was in sheer panic. Traffic was insane.  Terror filled the eyes of drivers around me Tuesday night as everyone was  fleeing the Waldo Canyon fire, which had exploded down the foothills and into nearby Mountain Shadows.

Burning embers rained on me and my skin was stung by ashen 65 mph winds as I  pulled out of the driveway and began my escape. I was soaked in sweat and my  mind raced with what I’d forgotten to grab and debated the best route to avoid the gridlock of Woodmen Road.

On Friday, as I returned from evacuation, it was spooky calm. Streets were empty. Most houses were dark.

I pulled into my driveway and felt a sense of huge relief, tinged with sadness.

I couldn’t help thinking of my friends and the hundreds of strangers in  Mountain Shadows who would never go home. I felt guilty for rejoicing at the sight of my home.

But I was so happy.

I made a quick tour of the place. There was the checkbook I’d forgotten to  grab. There was the gunk on the counter I’d neglected to clean up before  evacuating. There was my son’s unmade bed and pile of dirty clothes.

It was so beautiful to see.

More importantly, I looked out the window where we enjoy watching the world  go by. I saw the shark murals on my son’s bedroom wall. And I again saw the outlines of my kids on the garage wall, documenting their growth.

It brought tears because those are exactly the types of things many others  can never get back.

I stood in my driveway and watched as neighbors started to filter back.

It was a moment I’ll long cherish.

Neighbor Bill came up and we shook hands. Tim, who owns a nearby rental, drove by and we, too, shook. Sadly, he told me his house was burglarized during  the evacuation.

Cars drove by and waves were exchanged.

Finally, my neighbor Jeff came across the street. He’d been soaking his roof  with the hose when I pulled away Tuesday. At the time, we shook hands and said we’d see each other when it was over.

On Friday, we hugged.

We were thrilled to see each other. And we agreed we live in a special neighborhood.

We traded war stories of evacuation.

But all I could think about was the neighbors I didn’t see: our friend and his invalid wife.

Their house was dark. His car was gone. That never happens.

Where were they? Were they safe?

My answer came when I noticed the answering machine was flashing.

At first, I thought it was just my own call Wednesday, checking to see if the  house survived. If my lousy answering machine was working, I figured the house was safe. I was right.

I punched the button and listened to a message that made my wife, Cary, and  me ecstatic. It was the woman who helps care for our neighbor’s wife. They had  evacuated after all. They were safe in a hotel!

The news contributed to a deep sleep.

My most satisfying neighborhood reunion came at 7 a.m. Saturday as I picked  up my newspaper in the driveway.

The neighbors I had worried about were just pulling up.

I approached and he shook my hand and apologized for being stubborn.

I told him I was so worried. We all were.

He is a hero to me, the way he lovingly cares for his wife and still makes  the effort to toss my paper on the porch each morning, spend time with my kids,  buys flowers for Cary on mother’s day, and gives my dog, Nugget, a treat each  time he sees him.

He told me how “guys with guns” knocked on his door at 9 p.m. Tuesday as the  wildfire raged. Someone had called police and asked them to check the couple’s  welfare. (I will never admit it.) It took him 2½ hours to gather his wife and  get out.

And he’s glad he did. Wishes he’d done it sooner. He’s sorry for the fuss he  caused.

I don’t care. I’m just so glad they are safe.

It’s so good to be home.

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WALDO CANYON FIRE: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME is a post from: Side Streets