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Knowledge mined from Silverton hills – How a town is guiding its economic focus

The feisty mountain town is luring educators and researchers to its biological field station

Silverton – The hills are alive with the sound of scientific discourse.

By Electa Draper
Denver Post Staff Writer

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2354228,00.html

In silvered aspen glades and on mossy tundra, scientists and teachers are murmuring alongside brooks. And the nearby San Juan Mountains town of Silverton has come to realize that the "gold in them thar hills" doesn’t have to be extracted to be treasured.

Silverton morphed from a gritty, saloon-filled mining capital in decline into a summer tourist-train destination in the 1980s and 1990s. In the past several years it has forged a winter economy as a mecca for snowmobilers, avalanche forecasters and skiers of both cross-country trails and extreme vertical terrain.

Now Silverton is coming into its own as a biological field station, one of five in the state serving researchers and educators.

The 2-year-old Mountain Studies Institute has snagged back-to-back federal grants totaling $1 million with the help of Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell. And the nonprofit institute is bringing intelligent life to a long-empty town landmark, the 14-room Avon Hotel on Blair Street.

Visiting scientists can study and work in the field all day and return at night to one of the town’s beloved old party spots, mostly closed up for the past 12 years. The institute hopes to eventually buy the 1904-vintage hotel, a cozy place with a character divided between rustic lodge and Victorian boarding house.

After its late July move to the Avon, the institute played host in early August to high school teachers from around Colorado enrolled in a five-day mountain geography course funded by the National Geographic Society.

The institute also has partnered with Fort Lewis College in Durango, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management,among other colleges and agencies.

San Juan County Commissioner Peter McKay said the institute’s economic impact already has been huge. Just the fact that its executive director, Ellen Stein, bought a house in this tiny town is significant, he said.

"When I look down here at the Avon and see 18 to 25 cars parked, it really brings up the street," McKay said.

In mid-September, archaeologists will come to study "historic- structure assessment." One of the classrooms will be an old Shenandoah-Dives mine mill. Soon after, the institute will stage a conference on the "State of the San Juans," the mountain range that dominates 14 counties in southwestern Colorado. The event will double as the grand reopening ceremony for the hotel.

Stein jokes that a course in hotel management might be more handy for her than her degree in environmental studies given the excitement generated by the return of the Avon. She has agreed to let the local band Too Little Oxygen reprise a 1970s opening performance at the Avon.

"We wish she were opening a bar here, but we’ll take what we can get," band member, woodworker and electrician Michael Geryak says as he helps ready the Avon for its future.

But Silvertonians are growing accustomed to letting go of the old and grabbing onto the new. And hills that resounded with pounding hammers for a century are quietly humming.

Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or [email protected] .

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