October 4, 2011
Dear Family and Friends, 
It’s been quite a warm summer here in
the foothills of the Rockies. June and July were wetter than usual, but
the daytime temps were usually 75° and above. The rainfall may
account for the rich fall colors, which peaked the middle of last week.
The aspens have been glorious. Crowds of leaf peepers have been
parading through Nederland and along the Peak to Peak Highway (a
designated scenic highway that runs from Black Hawk and Central City to
Estes Park) to observe nature’s annual beauty pageant. Each year
thousands of folks travel along this 60-mile stretch of road to see
firsthand how the aspens have changed from bright green, to light
green, and finally to golden yellow—showing, occasionally, red/rust
colors. We don’t think the colors have been this splendid in more than
a decade.
Judy took the hummingbird feeders
in at the end of September and we haven’t seen any coming back for one
last feeding. We believe they are gone until next April, just around
tax time.
SUMMER
IN THE MOUNTAINS
For the first time that we can
remember we’ve been home all summer—and
we have enjoyed it. A lot! We’ll probably do it regularly from now on.
We enjoyed our pleasant routines: selling tickets at the Carousel;
telling people
where to hike and camp, how far it is to Estes Park, how to get to the
Interstate, where the public bathrooms are, et al. at the Visitors
Center; selling refreshments at the Backdoor Theater on Friday nights
and sweeping up
spilled popcorn after the movie; playing both social and duplicate
bridge as often as possible; making music on Wednesday nights; and
monthly Mystery Book Club discussions (A Lily of the Field
by John Lawton and John Le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor
were both worthy of recommendation).
Since we returned from our month
in the Canadian
Rockies, Judy has hiked each Thursday with a group of women from
Nederland, Boulder, and the surrounding Front Range. They have gone on
lots of trails in the Indian Peaks,
James
Peaks Wilderness Areas and Rocky Mountain National Park (see photo
below) along the east side of the Continental Divide, and she has seen
and photographed some of the area’s beautiful lakes, waterfalls,
wildflowers, meadows, overlooks, and, recently, the changing colors of
the aspens.
In addition to the hiking, Judy
continues with her running “schedule,” which, in addition to running up
here along Ridge Road, includes Saturday mornings in Boulder with the Purple
Runners and Sunday mornings with the Boulder Road Runners. Both
are informal, social running groups, though the Purple Runners group
keeps separate, cumulative scores for both men and women based upon
their finishing placements (not time). Winners are announced at the end
of each year, and sometimes there have been prizes. We were home this
year for the 30th
annual Neder-Nederland race, in which Judy won her age group,
adding a 14th polished geode slab to her trophy shelf that dates back
to 1992.
Hughes often goes down to Boulder
with Judy on Sundays to ride his bicycle for the hour or so that Judy
runs. Those Sundays, plus occasionally riding here in the mountains and
using the stationary bike, are his main forms of exercise. However,
September is, traditionally, the month to cut trees and split wood to
keep the woodstove going during the winter. That’s exercise, and he
finds it still satisfying and worth the physical effort, though cutting
and splitting does seem to get more challenging has he grows older. But
when the cold weather comes, those aches and pains quickly dissolve in
front of the warm fire. It’s easy to remember the African proverb:
“Chop your own firewood and it will warm you twice.” (Or, as W.C.
Fields has been quoted somewhere, “The nation needs to return to the
colonial way of life, when a wife was judged by the amount of wood she
could split.”)
THE
LITTLE RED TOAD
Back in 1992 we bought a red Toyota
4Runner when we moved to Nederland. It has served us well in the past
20 years: we plowed through deep snows, crept over treacherous mountain
passes on dirt tracks that date back to the 19th century mining days,
towed trailer loads of cut trees out of wooded areas for firewood,
hauled trash to the dump, and carted mulch to our garden areas. With
over 150,000 miles, it was just broken in—it still has that many miles
left on it, or more. Hughes always figured he would kick the bucket
long before the 4Runner would head for the junk yard.
However, our needs took a turn this
summer: while we still need 4wheel drive or AWD here during the snow
and ice season, our present travel style calls for a lightweight
vehicle that we can tow behind our RV when we go away for more than a
casual weekend of camping. Last winter in Arizona, we had our bicycles,
which we used nearly every day, but found we were too far from a
grocery or hardware store, or from an event in the area to get there by
bike. Plus, we had to limit what we could bring back to what would fit
in a backpack. Our solution: trade the heavyweight Toyota 4Runner in on
a lightweight Toyota Rav4. The difference: the Rav4 is 1,200 pounds
lighter (curb weights 2,535 lbs. vs. 3,740 lbs.) and it gets 60% better
mileage. The manual transmission makes it possible to tow the Rav4
behind the RV with four wheels down: we simply put the transmission in
neutral, turn the key to the accessory position, and tow it away. Since
it’s the same color as the previous big red 4Runner, we’re calling it
the “Little Red Toad,” (a “toad” is RV-ese for a towed vehicle).
50th
ANNIVERARY
The Sunday edition of the Boulder Daily Camera always runs announcements of
engagements, weddings, and significant anniversaries. Couples submit
articles and photos in advance and they all, to our knowledge, get
published somewhere around the date of the event. Apparently September
is a particularly busy month and submitting the article four weeks in
advance is not soon enough. The article and photos we sent in, if they
were received (and we have no confirmation that this happened), have
not yet appeared. So, to ensure there is a record of what has been a
long anticipated event in our lives—one that we want to proudly share
with our friends and family—below is what we submitted for publication.
We hope that it will show up in the paper, but in case it doesn’t for
some reason, we wish to make the announcement here as it would appear
in the newspaper:
MOIR—50th
Hughes
Moir and Judy Chasan were married September 24, 1961, at the Bucks
County Playhouse Inn in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Judy’s hometown. New
Hope’s Mayor John Flood and Bill Dryer, Judy’s high school drama
teacher, performed the ceremony which Hughes and Judy wrote (it was a
very 60s thing to do).
They were both students at Antioch College in Yellow
Springs, Ohio. Hughes completed his A.B. the following June while Judy
dropped out to work full time at Fels Research Institute in Yellow
Springs.
They moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where Hughes
taught school and where their children were born. He earned a Master’s
Degree at Boston University (1965) and, later, a Doctorate at Wayne
State University in Detroit (1969) where he also taught. The family
moved to Toledo where Hughes taught at The University of Toledo and
Judy completed B.S. degrees (cum Laude) in Biology and Medical
Technology in 1974. She worked as a toxicologist at Riverside Hospital
in Toledo until retiring in 1990. Hughes retired as Professor Emeritus
from UT the same year and they moved to Nederland in 1992.
They have two children: Michael (who married Cindy
Bender) of Lafayette, Colorado, and Debra (who married Dan Budde) of
Milton, Massachusetts. Their grandchildren are Griffin Budde, a
sophomore at Wake Forest University, and Julia Budde, a senior at
Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts.
Since moving to Nederland, Judy joined the Nederland
Fire Protection District, earned her EMT, firefighter, and wildland
firefighter certificates, and retired in 2004 as Captain after ten
years of active duty. She has been Treasurer of the Nederland Chamber
of Commerce, Director of the Neder-Nederland races, and a volunteer at
the Nederland Visitors Center, Nederland’s Backdoor Theater, the
Carousel of Happiness, and Boulder Community Hospital. She continues to
be a competitive runner, regularly winning her age group in local
races, including the Bolder-Boulder, plus national and foreign races.
She ran the Boston Marathon in 1988 and 1989.
Hughes was a professional storyteller for twenty
years before coming to Nederland. Since 1992 he has volunteered as a
teacher’s aid at the Nederland Elementary School, was President of the
Aging Services Foundation of Boulder County, and for nine years served
on the Boulder County Aging Services Committee; he helped establish the
Nederland Community Library, the Nederland Library Foundation, and the
Nederland Mystery Book Club; he was a Trustee of the Nederland Fire
Protection District for five years and published a quarterly newsletter
for the District; he wrote a weekly column about library issues for the
Nederland’s newspaper, The
Mountain-Ear, and for ten years he was Director of the Nederland
Visitors Center where he continues to volunteer; he plays trombone in
the Barker Dam Brass Band and guitar in McGinty’s Wake, a local
celtic-bluegrass group.
They are both avid readers and bridge players. They
enjoy camping and traveling: they have visited every state and
continent, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, trekked the Himalayas and New
Zealand’s Milford Track, hiked the Swiss Alps and Peru’s Inca Trail,
rafted the Grand Canyon, and dived the Great Barrier Reef. They will
celebrate their anniversary with a river cruise through central Europe
in October.
All good wishes to you for a brilliant fall and upcoming holiday
season.
Hughes and Judy
