LYONS, COLORADO

VisABILITY is based in Lyons, Colorado. It’s a small town tucked in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. You can’t see it in this photo. The town is lodged between foothills right above the word “Colorado.”

At 5,374 feet above sea level our elevation is modest by local standards. Some nearby mountains break 14,000 feet. A few towns perch above 8,500. Nevertheless, Lyons is every inch a mountain town, with a little bit of Mayberry and some Northern Exposure thrown in.

We’re located 12 miles north of Boulder. That’s an exciting city. Like Lyons, Boulder is big on bicycling. It has many other distinctions: “#1 Best Place to Live on Earth” according to Newsweek magazine; “#1 Healthiest City in the USA” according to USA Today. Other publications and polls have bestowed ”Best Sports Town,” “Most Highly Educated Citizens,” “Foodiest City”(whatever that means), ”Best Running City,” and “#1 Clean & Green City. (Author’s note: in the ten months that passed since the preceding list was assembled Boulder won several more honors. The Gallup Healthways Well Being Index even rated it the nation’s happiest city.)

Sure, Boulder is a neat place. But most Lyons residents think those citations are a bit over the top. We expect the flock of Boulder folks who move to Lyons heartily agree with that skepticism.  Do note that point: many Boulder people move to Lyons…..   MANY!

Nevertheless, we admit our neighbor town is eco-sensitive, environmentally passionate and creature-friendly.  Just like Lyons.

An area where Boulder is a bit excessive is its attitude towards wildlife.  That town is SO creature-friendly you will see “DEER CROSSING” signs on major city streets. Official Statistics: Boulder is home to  94,673 human beings and has approximately 1,000 deer comfortably grazing on anything green in backyards, golf courses and parks. The deer herd is becoming large enough to talk about running its own candidates for political office.

To the uninformed it may appear that the coexistence of deer and human folk is an attractive, warm and fuzzy municipal quirk. It is NOT! Keep reading – and you’ll find out how Bambi now lures life-threatening danger into residential communities in Boulder and environs, including Lyons.

The original Lyons families bred generations of sturdy, laid-back hardworking people. Ranching and rock quarrying have been traditional Lyons occupations for generations. In recent years Lyons also became home to artists, writers and musicians and a growing colony of food culinary experts. It is said we have a yuppie or two living here. Plus a few ex-hippies who made it this far during the California migration of the sixties, but couldn’t figure out how to get over the mountains.

An earlier migration consisted primarily of gold miners. The sign on the right welcomes back road travelers to a former gold mining town in the mountains a few miles above our house. Note the numbers. You can’t survive at 8,500 feet without a sense of humor.

Lyons is also home to Planet Bluegrass, the renowned sponsor of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on Colorado’s Western Slope and three annual events in Lyons: The Colorado Folks Festival, the RockyGrass Festival and the Festival of the Mabon (Moon). The local events are conducted on the gorgeous grounds of a former stagecoach stop a couple hundred feet from our office.

For a few weeks each summer, our town is taken over by music loving tourists attracted by world class talent playing at Planet Bluegrass festivals. Here is a partial list of those who participated in recent festivals, enjoyed our coffee shops and restaurants and even jammed with the local talent in our little town:  KT Tunstall; Kris Kristofferson; Alison Krauss & Union Station; Chris Isaak; Ani DiFranco; Yonder Mountain String Band; Emmylou Harris; Ray LaMontagne; Norah Jones; Doc Watson; Nanci Griffith; Arlo Guthrie; Natalie MacMaster; Earl Scruggs; Joan Baez; Bruce Hornsby; Susan Tedeschi; Del McCoury Band; Joan Osborne; Richie Havens; Indigo Girls; Randy Newman; Missy Higgins; John Prine; Kasey Chambers; Pinetop Perkins; Sam Bush David Grisman; Gillian Welch; Nickel Creek; John Hartford; Rosanne Cash; Warren Haynes; Ricky Skaggs; John Paul Jones; David Crosby; Tim O’Brien.

Lyons renowned music scene is enriched by folks who attended events at Planet Bluegrass, fell in love with our community and stayed for a while. Or stayed forever.  Every weekend, and often in the middle of the week, informal jam sessions and planned performances are held all over town in parks, coffee shops and other venues – especially at the famed Oskar Blues restaurant and blues bar.   Lyons is truly the “great bluegrass mecca of the West,” a title granted to our town by the Denver Post.

Nobody is sure how many Grammy Award winners live in town, but there is at least one in this photo of a typical session at Oskar Blues.  People we regard as neighbors, people who we run into at the Post Office, library and school functions are “locals” to us – and major stars to music fans throughout the country.

Lyons is a small town. Through its center runs a whitewater section of the North Saint Vrain river, a short but exciting kayak course.  In the middle of one of the town’s parks it merges with its cousin, the South Saint Vrain river. So it’s natural that we are a big fly fishing destination for Colorado anglers.

Main Street, our company’s location, features a three block mix of antique shops, art galleries, and outrageous restaurants. Not typical small town fare, we have some special places like Bird Dog Press, where Alli Bozeman designs nostalgic graphics and then produces them with traditional materials and methods, including an ancient letterpress machine; Matsuri, the Japanese Restaurant our friends from Tokyo always want to visit; Ohm Gallery, the central gallery for the area’s top local artists; Quilting Hands, a nationally recognized emporium for quilting enthusiasts. Perhaps the most unique Lyons business is housed a few doors down the street from our office. South Creek Limited is the home of Mike Clark, who makes arguably the best custom bamboo fly fishing rods in the world. You can try to order one of Mike’s creations today, handmade to your personal specifications.  If you are lucky enough to get on Mike’s waiting list, you can look forward to receiving your custom rod in something like six years.

Despite the presence of an internationally recognized  fly-fishing icon and the constant presence of area anglers, these photos show another role played by the river. During summer it is heavily used by locals and tourists who carry inner tubes to the west edge of town, float to the east edge and then trudge back to repeat the cycle.

Lyons abuts two former ranches that are now in the Boulder County Open Space inventory – offering nearly 11,000 acres of locally owned wilderness recreation area to townies and tourists. Adjacent to County Open Space is the Roosevelt National Forest and, a few miles beyond that you hit Rocky Mountain National Park -  Colorado’s Wilderness Cathedral.

Tourists and music fans aren’t the town’s only visitors. Mule deer wander into town. Elk and bighorn sheep graze on the ridges above. (The photo is of a herd of about 160 elk that moved across the alpine meadow next to our house and up the mountain one snowy evening.) Coyotes work the rabbit and prairie dog populations at the edges of Lyons. Eagles circle overhead. Black bears occasionally visit a local dumpster or bird feeder. Footprints in the snow indicate another mountain lion passed through town during the night. In fact, last year a Boulder County Sheriff was driving through the Lyons Cemetery at 2:30 AM. In the darkness he hit a deer. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the patrol car. The sheriff wanted to see if the deer was seriously injured so, he could euthanize it if necessary. By the time he walked back to the impact spot, about 10 yards from where he had parked, a mountain lion was dragging the deer back through the tombstones. The cemetery is in the middle of town, about 4 blocks from our offices.

There is a story here in Boulder county. It’s your story too. Today we read about coyotes in New York’s Central Park, bear in suburban Boston dumpsters, alligators in Tampa swimming pools and sea lions taking over California piers. Lyons is on the edge of wilderness, so we see more and we see it more often. But what we see is becoming universal. One way or another all wild species adapt when their habitat is absorbed for shopping centers and suburbs. And they adapt for their own survival, not for human convenience – or safety. Our friend and Boulder resident David Baron, science reporter for NPR and for Public Radio International’s The World, wrote the story. His book is as gripping as Jaws - a nonfiction account of the shifting balance of nature right here in the Boulder Valley. The title is The Beast In The Garden. This book is fun, enormously entertaining, a bit unsettling – and important. Read the first ten paragraphs and decide for yourself.

Mountain lions have lived among us forever, and never caused a serious problem.  We know they are here. We almost never see one. They are always watching us. The photo on the right is of Janice, VisABILITY president and co-author of this blog standing next to a sign on a hiking trail behind our house. We take the sign seriously now.

Lyons has long been known by the self-applied distinction “Double Gateway to the Rockies.” That’s because to reach the majesty of the high country from the great plains you have to drive up one of the canyons that interrupt the wall of mountains every 20 or 30 miles from New Mexico to Montana.  Lyons has two! A few feet from our offices two scenic highways leave town, heading up and west. They travel through different canyons, each spectacular in its own right. They’re called, with typical Western reticence “the South” and “the North”, those being references to the North Saint Vrain and South Saint Vrain creeks which run snowmelt through Lyons and down to the plains. About twenty miles up the canyon via the North, or thirty miles via the South, is the town of Estes Park. The roads join together at the edge of Estes in front of the famed Stanley Hotel.  That collection of white clapboard buildings is where a vacationing author Stephen King began to wonder what might happen if a mentally unstable man got snowbound  for a long, dark winter in a mountain hotel.

Estes Park is the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. To get to the park, twenty five minutes earlier you would have driven right past our buildings in Lyons. (Over a million cars do that each year.)  Four hundred fifteen square miles of rock-ribbed wilderness, Rocky Mountain National Park truly is a land of superlatives, with more than 110 peaks that soar above 10,000 feet and at least 60 that exceed 12,000 feet. It’s our Wilderness Cathedral, topped at 14,255 feet by the football field-sized summit of Longs Peak, the mountain at the top of this page. (The mountain is named after an army officer named Long. Yet there is no plural or possessive in the mountain’s name. I have no idea why it is not Long’s Peak.)

The old adage says: Location. Location. Location!   We’re not bragging about Lyons, just stating the facts. Lyons really IS the end of the Yellow Brick Road.  With all this natural beauty and with more hours of sunshine than San Diego or Miami, Lyons is the perfect location for us to live, work and keep things in perspective.  All of the VisABILITY staff are Type A people – determined always to exceed client expectations. Pursuit of this standard is realistic in environs that help us stay content, mellow, productive – and grateful.

If you want to learn more about this blessed place, the Chamber of Commerce provides facts and information.  If you’d like to read the Chamber’s signature publication, try this PDF version of the LyonsFirst Guide Book. This is where you’ll find some cool articles like: Out in the Middle of Everywhere; Lyons Factoids; Quarry Town, Colorado; Notable Neighbors; Lyons: A Musical Mecca; Ars Longa, Vita Brevis (Art is long, life is brief); Lyons Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Events; Boulder County Wilderness Areas Near Lyons; Lyons – Preferred Day Trip Destination; Attractions and Activities Within 30 Minutes of Lyons; Something is Always Brewing  in Lyons; Lyons Renaissance (Reprinted from Boulder Magazine); Planting a Community Example – The Extraordinary Lyons Garden Club; The Lyons Community Foundation; Walking the Good Green Road Together – Sustainable Lyons; Index of Businesses by Category; Business Member Directory and more.

This essay about our beloved town is also posted on our company website:  http://visability.com/    Special thanks to Lyons Area Chamber of Commerce and “Brian Donnell – Ducks in a Row Studio” for the really good photos in this article. I took the bad ones.    jb