Monthly Archives: March 2011

Presenting: Ben’s Top Ten Places in Colorado to Flyfish

Posted on March 30, 2011 | 3 Comments

Fly fishing, something I have done less and less of as a father but am determined to resurrect this year with my boys, is my taste of heaven. Now saying that, I do not like waters that anglers necessarily are supposed to like. I have a very high beauty aesthetic for one; I appreciate watersheds where, when I get skunked (an unfortunate regularity post-fatherhood, as I apparently forgot almost everything about angling except how to pull a woolly bugger out of my ear), at least I spent a few hours in a beautiful place. So you will NOT see local haunt Eleven Mile Canyon here because I practically boycott that zoo of trucks, sedans, dirt bikes and dust. Nor will you see brown-lining for carp behind REI in Denver. The Dream Stream? The Blue? No flywater nicknames Asbestos Ally (because of I-70 semi’s using low gear), populates this list, no matter how big the trout. Nor is my fly line so desperate for a tug to go for a ride behind the golden Rocky Mountain bonefish.

You will see some places you hopefully have never heard of. I will hopefully ruffle some feathers about giving away secrets. In almost all cases, the specific time I mention makes the fishing pretty stupid easy. A good number of these involve hoofing it. One involves some serious cash. There is some really choice stuff ahead.

Each of these will be discussed in more thorough detail in later blog posts.

 

Colorado Board of Tourism demanded a 14'er in the background and an angler without waders. Tanager Photography knew the man for the job. Air Temp 51 degrees, Labor Day Weekend '07

10. Arkansas River above Salida and below Brown’s Canyon, late April to Mother’s Day: this is classic, Montana-style water and offers some of the best caddis-nymphing in the west. At times, the fish are spectacularly stupid and compliant just before the famous Mother’s Day Caddis Hatch, a hatch so epic, wives of anglers throughout Colorado are known to cook their own breakfast the second Sunday morning in May.

 

9. Roaring Fork River through the Aspen Institute, late Fall: this is really cool water. It’s a mini-gorge on the outskirts of Aspen, and it goes through the world-famous Aspen Institute with all it’s awesome, Bauhaus architecture. And it’s fly-fishing only water.

8. Colorado River Pumphouse Float, post run-off: It’s with sad news that I must announce my father sold his 14′ self-bailing Hyside raft last weekend. The Pumphouse is where Summit County guides take clients to look like rock stars who actually know how to catch fish. Not near anything, about 45 minutes downstream of cosmopolitan Kremmling.

7. Big Thompson and St. Vrain, Rocky Mountain National Park: my preference for these streams is to wet wade them (no waders) in late afternoon in the summer. But it’s also fun when you have to leave the stream by 5 pm because the elk bed down there in the fall. Mostly tiny fish, but what a setting.

6. Long Lake Inlet, 4th of July: talk about specific. This is the nirvana of gem-like trout (Emerald Lake strain rainbows that are half vermillion and leopard spotted) without brains that like to eat anything that floats or egg flies. I’ve been told I’m going to hell for revealing this spot, but Long Lake gets a good 700 Boulderites a weekend along it’s shores, and I’m sure they’ve seen fools in rubber pants plying the waters. The key is where and when.

5. Cheesman Canyon most months of the year: the nearest local legend, a nice half mile hike over badly worn scree, this place is no secret. What is a secret is how to catch some of the five to eight pound fish that live in gin-clear water and eat insects the size of hair follicles.

4. Tomahawk, Middle Fork of the South Platte, mid-August: the lesser-known local legend fishes wonderfully when all other rivers are too warm, and since I’m into getting bit by horseflies repeatedly, it’s not a problem for me to leave the waders behind and work this straight upstream. It is rare that I have less than a half mile of water here to myself. Best fish I’ve landed on this little 20′ wide stream? 22″ brown on a parachute hopper. Next best was a 21″ brown on a size 18 parachute Adams on 6x. Pretty cool when the previous 25 fish for the day could fit in the palm of your hand.

Now the Natal Waters. The Western Slope

 

Lower San Miguel between Sawpit and Norwood Bridge

3. The San Miguel, Labor Day to Fall Color Peak: I believe my name on God’s white stone is Miguelito. The most ethereal dry fly day I’ve ever had was in a constant fog on slightly milky water with constantly rising wild rainbows slurping comparaduns while the hillside looked like a Cheeto-explosion in the riot of aspen fall color. A true, undamned freestone in Colorado’s Southwest. I’ll post my tarantula video from that day when I blog this.

 

2. The Bar ZX, Paonia, CO: talk about legends. I have seen photos of 25 pound rainbows caught here and have personally seen 20 pound brown trout. The largest trout I ever landed was here, a ten pound rainbow in a driving rainstorm. It is the only place I have had trout take my line to the backing, and I have had that happen regularly. Add to that probably the finest elk habitat on the planet and a sheer 2500 foot granite face covered in waterfalls on the northeast horizon and well… bring your check book for some fun with Dean Lampton.

 

East Portal Cataract 1 mile below campground. That tiny angler next to the white rock is me.

1. The Gunnison: Where to begin? Want to start with compliant brookies above Crested Butte in the main tributary, the East? Or how about New Year’s Day below Taylor Reservoir dam casting for fickle 15 pound whales? Or how about breaking a rod on a kokanee salmon that goes through your legs in August? Or how about your wife’s first trout, a 17″ brown? No? What about the best four mile float in the state, where you get out and eat dinner at the take out, Garlic Mike’s? What about the definition of frustration, casting to 20, 20 inch trout obviously slurping caddis at dusk but steadfastly refusing your offering in Neversink? How about the prettiest trout in the state in the veritable cathedral of angling, the Black Canyon? What about a walk/wade/swim for two days, where you go down one trail named Wildcat and come out another named SOB? How about a poor man’s drift on the south bank at the Gorge’s mouth? To ask what my favorite part of the Gunnison is, is a little like asking which of my kids is my favorite. The river is unmatched, perhaps in the west, for diversity, extremes, trout density, size of fish, and all of it within 150 miles from start to end.

 

Now a coda to this post: I hope to add another to this list in 2011: the Blue River below Green Mountain Reservoir, probably in late June. The Blue is the previously derided Asbestos Ally up in Silverthorne. You actually fish off the sidewalks for the Factory Outlets. But way downstream, below big Green Mountain Reservoir, it’s a beast to access. But the word is, the trout are pretty beastly too. Here’s an example.

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What Happens to Roadkill in Colorado Springs?

Posted on March 28, 2011 | 3 Comments

One of the fun things about showing properties in Colorado Springs are mule deer encounters. It’s especially fun when buyers from more “urban” environments who are startled by bucky and Bambi lounging on lawns.

 

A common problem in 80919: Deer that don't even use the grass

But there’s a bit of a problem afoot. Number one, according to the Division of Wildlife, there are too many deer in town. While there are some in-town predators (more on that later), the number one cause of death of a mule deer in the city is an encounter with an automobile. There is no definitive number for the number of mule deer in the city limits of Colorado Springs, but their sheer numbers show how likely an automobile and deer encounter is. A few years ago, the Division of Wildlife conducted a study just in 80905 and 80906, and they found more than 1000 animals ranging from Cheyenne Mountain Park to Skyway. It’s estimated that at least that many live in 80919 up against the Pike National Forest and Air Force Academy. The DOW also estimates that there are 460,000 mule deer in the state. That’s about ten people per mule deer. It probably would not be a stretch to say that there are 3000 to 4000 deer west of I-25 up the pass to Cascade from the Broadmoor to the Academy. Now add to that drought. One of the only places a deer can find water in this super-dry spring is in a gutter. One of the only places the grass is succulent is the suburbs on the lawn of someone that has kept after it all winter. The foothills may look like their appropriate range, but deer are mobile and go to where the pickings are easy and the water is available. In other words, if you live west of I-25, just about anything you plant in your yard is ice cream to a mulie.

 

Now, what I have linked here is not for everyone. You’ll note, I’m not embedding it, because the facts might be interesting, but the video… unappealing to your tastes. It depicts a deer after it has been killed by a car and is turned into… um… burger… in my friend’s garage. In this case, this deer died instantly. Other friends saw it get hit by an SUV. In a time of budget cuts and in a time of most citizenry being completely detached from their food source if it doesn’t come on styrofoam and wrapped in celophane, the sight of a dead or dying animal is a problem, because there is no money in the government budget to clean it up and no one wants to look at it. There is no abundance of CDOT or CDOW workers and trucks to pick up every animal, and remember, we let parks’ lawns burn and die and dim our streetlights around here. Correspondingly, there is no proper way governmental way to dispose of a deer carcass for most citizenry.

There are a few folks though that like the concept of “deputizing” themselves, and ridding the sidewalks and boulevards of dead deer. My friend Morgan is one. He has a state issued tag allowing him to clean up the animal. He shows how to butcher it (field-dress sounds better), and gives a deer anatomy lesson to his two children and my three (I’m the guy in the REALTOR “costume”, the striped shirt, and I hurriedly left showing a million dollar property in Black Forest for the honor of being with my kids at this educational event. Morgan’s the dude in the bloody Carhartts). Here is the video.

The DOW does not give out the number of animals roadkilled every year, but they do give out stats on the number that are “harvested” by hunters statewide. Last year it was 34,750. Considering that they sold 78,600 tags, therefore, almost 4 in 10 hunters got an animal. Yes, I say this as a way of defending the harvesting of a roadkill animal. I don’t hunt, but a lot of my friends do. Almost 35,000 deer were killed by hunters in 2010. The vast majority of those were killed by rifle. A lot of those were taken out of the woods by a truck or an ATV, not by backpack. Very few were taken by archers, my little bully-pulpit of sportsmanship’s preferred method because it seems to be the most equal playing field (a playing field I’m pretty sure the deer still doesn’t agree with).

All that is to say: this deer was already dead. My friend didn’t hit it, he was 15 minutes away when a friend saw it happened and texted him when he got to lunch at Chik-Fil-A. Instead of the animal occupying landfill, it became, well, backstrap and bratwurst. The point is, it was dead, and rather than allowing the resource to rot and go to waste, something productive was made of it.

And yes, I ate some of it. It was fantastic. No, I’m not getting a cattle-grate for the front of the Mercedes, but yes, I can now say I made gourmet roadkill. Here’s the recipe:

Venison Backstrap Peppersteak Filets

  • One Venison Backstrap sliced into two inch medallions (cleaned to remove any deer hair)
  • 3 T Butter
  • 6 cloves garlic, diced
  • 3 T mixed peppercorns (prefer pink and green to go with black)
  • 1/2 cup red wine
  • 1 cube beef bouillon
  • Herbs de Provence and Salt to taste

After making medallions, press in peppercorns on all sides of the meat and allow it to sit at room temperature covered. Season with salt to taste. Allow it to sit for 30 minutes. Heat a large cast iron skillet to medium high and melt butter. Add beef bouillon to wine and stir rapidly, set aside. Add garlic and stir frequently to keep from burning. Cook for 30 to 45 seconds until just golden. Add meat. Cook three minutes a side until just firm. Add wine and bouillon mixture and add Herbs de Provence to taste. Allow sauce to thicken and reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer for about one minute. Plate and serve.

One final note on Living with Wildlife: The DOW is anticipating a terrible bear season. Bears are a reality in the foothills and so are mountain lions to a degree. The foothills of Colorado Springs are packed with scrub oak and they produce an abundance of protein-rich acorns that bears love. Just with the scrub oak alone, the city’s westside is incredible bear habitat. Now add to that garbage. Bears have an uncanny memory for food sources. The DOW had to euthanize more than a half dozen bears in the metro area last year (in fact, when I asked if it was a “half dozen” the terrestrial biologist chuckled and said “oh, it was a good bit more than that”. We’ll stick with a half dozen). So if you live in the foothills, or are heading up the pass, drive a little more carefully. And if you live in the foothills and are planning your summer garden, consider what the deer will eat and won’t eat, and for crying out loud: don’t put your garbage out the night before pick-up. Bears are cool, but a garbage-eating bear is a dead-bear: once it has imprinted trash as tasty, a bear is addicted to trash as a food-source. Often this imprinting happens within one visit to a dumpster or can.

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The Pervasiveness of Luxury

Posted on March 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

I just completed an eight-hour consulting project for a developer. They wanted my insight on some spec homes that were not selling. I know I gave them the right advice, but I’ll bet it is not the advice they were hoping to get.

I’m my own worst critic and this presentation was 39 slides long and had lots of bullet points and lots of text. That basically equals a boring, lousy presentation. Showing is better than Telling, and I had to give the presentation in static form, and then also use it for a later follow-up live presentation. So I ended up with 39 slides and too much text. Really only a couple smashed home the point I wanted to deliver.

That point was: If you can’t compete with Holiday Inn Express, you shouldn’t build homes.

 

Actual Holiday Inn Showerhead

 

My best slide was titled “The Pervasiveness of Luxury” and I used this showerhead image. Below it, I had these facts: *Granite Slab Vanity*Cherry Cabinetry* Tile Floors in Bathroom *Big Showerheads *Energy Efficient Lighting * Complimentary Breakfast?

My point is that this weekend, we spent two nights in a Holiday Inn Express in Glenwood Springs. It’s pretty amazing what $100 a night gets you over Spring Break. All of the above. There was an added bonus: The Holiday Inn has an outdoor pool and hot tub. It was too cold to use those. But they had an unadvertised friendly-use-agreement with the next door Hampton Inn to use their indoor pool and hot tub at no charge. I guess the Hampton Inn guests could use the Holiday Inn pool in the summer.

My point: as consumers, we are expecting, nay, DEMANDING things be luxurious. If we’re going to spend our money with 9.5% unemployment (Colorado and Colorado Springs’ present rate) and a never-ending cycle of lousy news, then gosh-darn-it, we better get a lot of bang for our buck.

Increasingly, the consumer’s buck goes further. Yeah, gas is going up, but the reason people are not outraged by globalism like maybe they ought to be, is because they’re such incredibly empowered consumers. Why are people stoked about IKEA moving into Park Meadows? Well, how does offering “a wide range of home furnishing items of good design and function, excellent quality and durability, at prices so low that the majority of people can afford to buy them” Sound good? Target is easy to attain design. Starbucks is over 80,000 options at your fingertips for less than $5.

If you’re a builder, and you’re producing a product under $400K (where most local builders like to be), you 1.) are appealing to the top 10% of the marketplace in terms of household income. Whoa. 2.) you are competing with a number of recent other expensive acquisitions and purchases that embraced a lifestyle of luxury and customization. Finally, 3.) the buyer plans to live in this residence for 10 to 15 years. Whether they do or not doesn’t matter; what they say is “10 to 15 years” so moving into something that is already antiquated… doesn’t… make… sense. No one would buy an iPad without WiFi. They wouldn’t buy a TV without Hi-Def or HDMI (they wouldn’t have bought a TV without HDMI after 2007). The consumer knows that Southwest doesn’t charge for baggage or offer change of ticket fees. The consumer might know that a Holiday Inn Express offers granite vanities, tile bathrooms, a multi-setting oversized shower head AND a really cool personal pancake maker in the lobby that churns out an individually-custom- cooked slab of buttery goodness in 45 seconds, and that’s $102 a night.

Now it’s easy to read this and think “that assaults my profit margin!” The reality couldn’t be more different: the consumer is WILLING to pay more if they get more. Frankly, Southwest made me a customer for life this month when I rebooked my Cape Cod vacation. I had purchased five tickets for my family, and when I booked them, I had to select the terrible 10:30 pm arrival into Boston. It’s a total blast traveling with three boys in the middle of the night down MA3. But I found out that they had changed their fares, and now the 5:45 pm arrival was actually $2 per ticket less each way. I asked if they could pretty please change my ticket. They did. And they gave me a $10 credit, because the five new one-way fares were each $2 less. Did you read that? They not only: 1.) did what they said they would do they 2.) did it without me begging and 3.) when there was money leftover, they gave it back to me. I’m sorry, but as the provider for a family of five who has spent five years in the real estate recession, anyone willing to give me $10 back on my $1200 of luxury-dollars spent on airfare is a winner in my book. A $204 pair of nights in Glenwood and a $1200 airfare expense are both discretionary expenses in our budget; I was surprised and delighted with the value I received on both occasions.

If I was in the market for a $350,000 to $400,000 purchase… I sure as hell better be surprised and delighted with the value I get.

Never has it been more important to keep your home updated. In fact, there are now two classes of homes: updated, and out-of-date. There is no such thing as “market value” with an above-rate version of a home that is all updated and a sub-rate version of a home that is out-of-date. I showed a perfectly fine home that is taxed to the dollar as much as my own, two blocks from my residence. My re-finance appraisal estimated my value at $380,000 last year. This home is listed for $299,900. I showed it last week to a pair of buyers looking to do a flip. There’s one big, expensive project to do in the back, but really, it’s a tidy clean house with not much broken, plus it is stucco/cedar/tile roof. There are huge possibilities. These folks saw the possibilities, but still judged it as too expensive. It’s $299,900. It’s 4000 square feet on a 14,000 square foot lot in Pinecliff. The problem? It’s 1983 inside. Five years ago, this was okay. It just wasn’t updated. You’d pay more for the updated. Now, because it’s not updated, it’s priced like the bank-owned properties, and people will knock off 5 to 10% whenever they do offer on it because all they see is “the work”.

I mean, if Holiday Inn made me cook my own pancakes… if Southwest treated me like United has recently (like a mooing chunk of cattle)… if Zappos didn’t offer me two-way shipping for my strangely-shaped feet… I wouldn’t use them. But because they do make life luxurious and better and all-inclusive, I’m loyal to a fault.

When a company gets me loyal to a fault, I connect. I attach. I go out of my way to use that brand over other brands. If you need more proof, read Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment. Guy was the Macintosh evangelist for Apple in the early 80′s. The man knows of what he speaks. It doesn’t cost a lot more to make something enchanting. In fact, it costs a lot more to make something NOT ENCHANTING. Because if you fail to go that extra distance and connect with the

Richard Branson. Billionaire Shoe-Shiner

consumer, they go out of their way to AVOID YOU. But if you go just a couple steps, like Guy’s example of Richard Branson personally shining his shoes… you use that pervasiveness of luxury to create a salient point of lifetime connection.

 

The cost of failing to connect is the cost of losing all future business.

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Red Numbers: Sales Down… but so too listings, months of inventory…

Posted on March 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

If you see RED, it ought to get your attention.

Here is a seriously RED number: February 2011 returned a lousy 448 single family sales. That was 10% lower than… February 2009. In February 2009, for all intents and purposes, the local real estate market was declared in a flat spin and the popularity of gold was spiking. Last month saw 10% fewer sales than that month. Yes, the March Stat Pack is cooked and served up HERE.

Yet at the same time, listing volume was down by a similar amount. One of the slowest inventory builds ever witnessed happened in February 2011. Combined with 5 days that saw 0 degrees for the high, there is plenty of reason why the short 28 days of February saw such low sales activity:

  • There wasn’t much to buy in the first place…
  • Rates started to climb then began to drop at the month’s end as things heated up in the Middle East, oil started to rise and Wall Street got nervous
  • It was cold outside. REALLY cold.
  • And shoot, there still was not much to buy.

Here is a chart that compares the market on March 1, 2010 to March 1, 2011. Remember that one year ago there was an $8000 tax-credit carrot enticing first-time buyers into the market. That carrot is not here. That single reason is why the low sales of February 2011 (lowest February totals since 1997) saw a $28,000 average sales price increase from one-year prior.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The inventories year over year are very similar and the rate of sale is actually similar for the trailing 90 days. But what is red indicates what is lower:

  • the number of listings for sale, especially over $400,000
  • the number of sales, especially under $250,000
  • the months of inventory, especially over $250,000.

In other words, the game is changing: the bread and butter of the winter months, local first-time buyers: for now, they’re done. They bought last year. Or the year before. But who is starting to buy: relocating buyers that saw the writing on the wall in 2007 and didn’t buy and now are hungry for a deal. They typically buy on a shorter timeline (three to ten days of shopping, lots of online use) and generally buy the best-available home.

As bleak as the unit sales were for February, almost every other index worth watching showed health returning to the market: interest rates ended up dropping 0.2% at month’s end, supply actually went down, demand began picking up (1099 pending and under contracts on March 8, 2011), months of inventory shrank and average price spiked.

Read it all HERE.

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