Say ooh, ahhh
“West of Last Chance,” by Peter Brown and Kent Haruf, W.W. Norton & Co., $49.95
Big sky and vast horizons dominate author Kent Haruf’s literary landscape. Now he’s partnered with photographer Peter Brown to create a coffee-table book that pays homage to the wide-open plains and their people. Haruf’s elegant essays, some only a paragraph long, are as beautiful and evocative as Brown’s shots of the interior and exterior scenery of bumps in the road in eastern Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and South Dakota.
Eat a Peach
40th Annual Palisade Peach Festival, Aug. 14-17. palisadepeachfest or 970-464-7458
The annual summer slurp of Western Slope peaches gets a twist this year with the addition of “Feast in the Fields” dinners, Aug. 15 in Z’s Orchard and Aug. 16 at High Country Orchards. The local produce showcase dinners run $85 per person and you’ll need a reservation. But take in the festival parade, pancake breakfast and other fruity fun as you like, all weekend long. And do leave time to stop by the chamber’s booth, where the biggest, best peach in the valley will be displayed — wearing a crystal-encrusted crown — Friday and Saturday.
New to view
Gunnison Valley Observatory, off Gold Basin Road at the base of “W” Mountain, southwest of Gunnison on U.S. 50. Info:
Colorado’s largest public telescope is open at sunset every Friday night through September. Pay a small fee and you’ll get the chance to peer at the heavens through a telescope that lived in the Black Forest Observatory from 1985 to 2001. Paul Van Slyke had the instrument built for his Colorado Springs observatory so he could gaze at Halley’s Comet, but opened his dome to the public when he realized others wanted a peek, too.
