Category Archives: Communications

Related to communications amongst our group

Upcoming Events

Saturday May 5th 2018 – Palmer Lake Free Chipping Day,  9 a.m.-3 p.m. Palmer Lake residents can bring slash to a site on County Line Road east of the lake.  Arrange branches parallel with butt ends pointed toward the rear of the vehicle. No stumps, roots, lumber, trash. Remove pine needles from branches. Info: adrian@cusp.ws.

Saturday May 5th 2018 – Wildfire Preparedness Workshop  by the El Paso County office of Emergency Management.  At Ute Pass Elementary 9320 Chipita Park Rd, Cascade. Please RSVP at the website below for this free information day, offering homeowners and community groups resources and training on choice of two focus areas:
– Wildfire Assessment Program training to evaluate and improve wildlfire risk for homeowners
– How to achieve and maintain whole-neighborhood wildfire risk reduction efforts.
The event is free but please register in advance at www.epcwildfire18.eventzilla.net    This workshop will be repeated the following Saturday in Monument.

Saturday May 12th, 2018 starting at 08:30 — Mt Herman CWPP Mitigation work day.  We’ll continue work on N5 & N6 if needed, else move on to S4/S5.  More to come on this.

Saturday May 12th, 2018 – 2nd session in Monument, of the Wildfire Preparedness Workshop;  see May 5th info above but this one is in monument..  Appears to be “sold out” for the training portion, but attending the information exhibits shows open as of this posting.

Need Your Hours and Photos

Thanx to everyone for the great turnout and good work this weekend! We reduced quite a bit of the fuels in the gully, and got quite a bit of maintenance done north of the Gauntlet.

Please send to me any pictures y’all have of the work and I’ll post them. (Feel free to post them yourself, as Paula has done in the prior posting).  Plus we need some for the annual Firewise status renewal.

Also please email to me your hours worked or in attendance at our recent meeting at Mark’s, at the Pine Hills fire safety day, and at Saturday’s mitigation work. I’ll consolidate these numbers and send them on to our recorder. If you wish to include any personal hours worked on your own places, send that on also; indicate what is community vs personal please.

 

Chipping Day Photos

The first batch of photos from the July 8th 2017 chipping day have been uploaded.  Thanx again to all for the help!

 

Firewise Chipping & Bucking Day Success!

Thanx everybody for the great turnout and effort on our chipping and bucking day.  Combined we put in 64 hours of labor just today, cleared and chipped seven areas of brush and small timber, and got our firewood bunks bucked into usable sizes.  In addition to making our neighborhood safer — and looking nicer, too — we earned over $1400 of in-kind grant money for future projects!

We’ll post pictures to this site once we get them all downloaded.  A special thank you to Rich & Lindsey for the loan of The Monster Chipper  that worked so well for us …  it was one hungry beast!

Upper Monument Creek comments due this weekend

If you wish to provide feedback to the USFS on the Upper Monument Creek project (the big one in our area), your feedback is due by this Sunday night.  See the project web site for details.  In particular, look for the Upper Monument Creek DEIS about halfway down — the draft environmental impact statement.  There’s a lot of detail in there.  The Interested Public Letter states how to give feedback (email, for example).

Comments supporting the effort are always welcome!

We’re Firewise Again!

FYI, I recently received confirmation that we’re a Firewise Community again.  Congratulations to everyone for your work!  I have not yet received the official letter; when I do I’ll post it here so we can use it for our insurance discounts — or if you just want to frame it and put it on your wall 🙂

Upper Monument Creek Draft EIS Available

The USFS has published their Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Upper Monument Creek project.  This is the big federal project we’re supporting that will help us to reduce fire danger for our area.  Please review the documents on the project web site and provide feedback if necessary.  The feedback period is 45 days.

Things are moving along!

E5 and E8 – Almost funded, need a bit more please

We’ve nearly got a start on a full mitigation of the east-side of the Gauntlet: areas E5 and E8.  These are areas that threaten our whole community.  The contractor is ready to go, the property owners along that area have already agreed to pay for a considerable amount of mitigation, and CUSP is matching that amount.  Although we’ve got several thousand dollars committed already, we’ve still come up $725 short.

If the rest of us could pitch in a little, we could get this work completed.  $60 from each family would probably do it, more if you’re willing, but I’d prefer an even split.  If you can help out, please let Steve or Diane know ASAP* so we can get the ball rolling before the snow really hits.  Based on the response, I’ll get back to y’all with the amount (which may be less than 60; we’re already more than halfway there from those I’ve talked to.) 

Thanx!

*Please let us know by Oct 31/Halloween, we want to get on the contractor’s Nov schedule.