Come to the HCN holiday open house!
Our annual open house is December 11th; cavers and consultants visit the office.
The holidays will soon be upon us, and we’re hosting our annual Open House at our western Colorado office on Thursday, Dec. 11. Please join us at 119 Grand Ave., Paonia, for food, drink, door prizes and general merriment from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
CAVERS AND CONSULTANTS COME TO CALL
New subscriber Ron Reason stopped by in September to pick up some back issues and ended up doing an impromptu huddle with HCN’s design team, Cindy Wehling and Brooke Warren. Ron, who is based in Chicago, consults with newspapers and magazines around the world on editorial design, strategy and branding. He came through Paonia en route from Rocky Mountain National Park to Black Canyon National Park and onward to Great Sand Dunes — working toward his goal of visiting all the national parks in the system. He hopes to hit Glacier next; it’s near the University of Montana, Missoula, where he’ll be a visiting professor in January, and where HCN may feature in his course on visual storytelling and online journalism.
From Eugene, Oregon, came Tom Mendes, on his way to Albuquerque to visit his father and to stock up on New Mexico’s famous green chiles. He grew up in Santa Fe and is now a water analyst and hydrologist for the city of Eugene.
Former HCN intern Morgan Heim (summer 2007) of Boulder, Colorado, and her friend Emma Betts, visiting from Australia, dropped by to see us. They were taking a road trip through western Colorado, and Mo wanted to “revisit where all my fun began.” She’s now an associate fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers and a trustee of The WILD Foundation. She’s produced documentaries on subjects ranging from the rare fishing cat of Thailand to the impacts of the bark beetle epidemic in Wyoming and Colorado. Most recently, Mo took first place in conservation photography in the California Academy of Science’s 2014 Natural World Photography competition, with a shot of a mountain lion approaching a home at night.
Pat Jablonsky, who lives in nearby Delta, came in for a visit. An enthusiastic caver, she founded a volunteer group that picks lint out of Carlsbad Caverns — all the tiny bits of fabric, hair and skin cells that human visitors inadvertently leave behind, which can accumulate and damage cave formations. In late October, volunteers used wet rags, tweezers and brushes to remove 55 pounds of lint from the cave. Now retired from lint-picking, Pat spent many years working at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, doing research on caves, marking routes in South Dakota’s Wind Cave, and inventorying the skeletal remains of bats in Lechuguilla Cave.
