Back in May, some people proposed changing the name of Silt, a small town west of Glenwood Springs, because a new name would “increase the value of our property.” The town trustees wisely left it at Silt.
But the desire to use nomenclature to inflate real-estate prices never rests, and it struck in Grand County last week. A resident of Fraser proposed dumping its municipal motto, “Icebox of the Nation,” and replacing it with something less frigid. “I think there are a lot better amenities that highlight the area rather than ‘It’s cold,”‘ said Kirsten Laraby, who works for a company building high-end homes.
She talked to Joyce Burford, a town trustee who is marketing director for the local chamber of commerce, and so tomorrow night, the town board will discuss changing the motto.
Back in the 1970s, Martha and I survived four winters in Grand County, all of which is colder than a banker’s heart. We lived in Kremmling, whose motto was “Sportsman’s Paradise.” It was also known as “the Banana Belt of Middle Park” because when it was a balmy 30 below in Kremmling, it would be 35 below in Granby (“Dude Ranch Capital of Colorado”), only 25 below in Grand Lake (“Snowmobile Capital of Colorado”), and a hard 40 below in Fraser.
Old-timers assured us of two facts: Winter nights were even colder when they were kids, and Fraser wasn’t even the coldest spot in Grand County. That distinction belonged to Tabernash, a couple of miles down the road. It was a helper station in the days of steam locomotives, and giant mallets would leak steam as they waited for a train to assist up to the Moffat Tunnel. The leaking steam would instantly condense to ice when it hit cold metal, and freeze the driver wheels to the rails. Men would have to apply blow-torches in 55-below January nights before the locomotive could move.
Just how true those stories were, I never learned. And Tabernash did not have an official weather station, so there was no hard climatic data. But Fraser could probably change its motto to “Warmer than Tabernash” without objections from Tabernash.
That wouldn’t help sell real-estate, though. “Ike fished here” is more promising, but that was back in the days when the Denver Water Board allowed water to flow in Fraser-area streams. Everything else that comes to mind is pretty generic and would fit just about any mountain area suffering from an invasion of People of Money.
Fraser did inspire a suitable slogan for the Gunnison Country, though. My friend and colleague Allen Best, then living in Fraser, joined me and a daughter one February afternoon for a cross-country ski trip over Old Monarch Pass. We got slowed considerably by deep powder, and he came close to losing half a dozen toes as icicles clinked on our beards. Thus was born “The Gunnison Country: Where People from Fraser Go to Catch Frostbite.”
That’s hardly a marketer’s dream, though, and I’m having trouble finding appropriate slogans in Colorado. Salida is “The Heart of the Rockies,” which shouldn’t hurt real-estate sales. On the other hand, it inspires obnoxious tourist questions like “If This is the Heart, Where’s the Armpit?” It also leads to institutional names like “Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center,” which is such a mouthful that people just say “the hospital.”
Nearby Poncha Springs is “Crossroads of the Rockies.” That’s attractive to commercial developers, but who wants to build that dream retreat next to a busy crossroads?
Saguache is the “North Gateway Thru the Prosperous San Luis Valley.” I once asked Dean Coombs, publisher of its newspaper, just where this “Prosperous San Luis Valley” might be, since “prosperous” hardly fits the one we know and love. “You have to go through Crestone and become enlightened,” he explained, “and then you’ll be able to visualize a prosperous San Luis Valley.” So there’s another slogan not of much use in adding value to local property.
I figured that some Colorado town must have devised a motto which would help sell high-end real estate. So I called the Colorado Municipal League, hoping there was a statewide list of slogans. But they don’t keep one.
Besides, Colorado doesn’t have a shortage of pricey amenity-laden real estate. It has a shortage of affordable housing. So perhaps we should search for municipalities with down-home, price-depressing slogans like “Home of the World’s Hungriest Mosquitoes,” “Land of the Double-Wides” and even “The Nation’s Icebox.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
