Somewhere between the city of Denver and the town of Last Chance lies a “ghost town” called Cabin Creek—it’s out there on U.S. Route 36 and it’s available for you to buy.

For an asking price of $350,000, you would get “just under 5 acres of property with the old Gas Station, 8 room Motel, Road Side Restaurant Café, 8 space RV Park, 2 Houses, and private shooting range.” The gas station measures 3,300 square feet and was actually once used as a movie theater. The roadside café has “small seating area, bathroom, cook kitchen, manager’s office, underground cold storage room and 3 bedrooms in the basement.”

According to the Denver FOX affiliate, the place was once “quite the gathering spot”—as a neighbor from nearby Byers attested, the café used to serve “the best chicken fried steak in the state.”

The seller’s name is James Johnson, and he has been pleasantly surprised by all the attention the property is getting. Johnson’s wife would like to retire and do some traveling but “the project” keeps them there. To their credit, the ad does a thorough job of walking buyers through the amount of work—some of it “nasty work” that “nobody likes to do”—that would be required to make a go of it. The Johnsons are looking to relocate to somewhere even more remote than Cabin Creek—they’re thinking about “Idaho or Montana.”

The neighbor mentioned above also noted that the property has a gruesome past, commenting that “there was a murder there.  There was some people that they took in, felt sorry for or something, and they found out the couple had money.”

The murder put the little roadside stopping place under a cloud. Johnson noted that after that, “everything just, literally, there was nobody here, so these buildings sat totally vacant.  Nothing going on out here for a number of years.” So clearly, if you want to say the place is “haunted,” go for it (the Johnsons don’t use the word).

The property is perfect if you want to live out your fantasy of being that odd rural movie character who spooks the city slickers after they get lost in the middle of nowhere and need to gas up and get some directions.

“Most neighbors are hundreds of acres away,” says the ad, in a sentence that forges new ground in putting an uneasy weight on the word “most.”

Using the term “ghost town” for the unusual property has its up side and its down side—it’s great for attracting attention among potential buyers but when the time comes to secure a loan, it ceases to be such a positive thing, Johnson says. “The hardest part out here is you’re not going to get a regular conventional loan on this property. You say ghost town and they say what?”
 

 

 

 
More pics after the jump…....
 

 
Earlier this month, the Colorado Department of Transportation rolled out a series of PSAs to discourage folks from driving while they’re stoned. While I agree no one should drive while they’re high—hell, I don’t think people should even drive while taking Benadryl, cold/ flu medications, painkillers or especially too much coffee—these commercials seem pretty silly to me. The stereotypical dum-dum stoner is in full effect here.

I posted all three commercials here for your viewing pleasure. I also added some choice comments from the general public from the YouTube comments. I’m not endorsing these comments, I am merely stating “here they are” and “make of this what you will.”
 

- Nobody gets high alone, bullshit PSA nobody will relate to. 

- I call bullshit.  Potheads don’t buy T-Bones, they buy double cheeseburgers and more pot.

- Apparently being stoned on marijuana magically reduces your to cognitive abilities to that of a chimpanzee.  Who knew. 

- I inject 4 marijuanas, now i punch babies for fun.

- Hey CDOT, if you want marijuana consumers to listen to you, I’d suggest talking to them like the rational, normal adults they are instead of insulting them.

- Well I don’t know what drug he was on cuz it definitely wasn’t weed…

- I’ve never broken something or forgot to do an important step, while high. This commercial makes us look stupid.

- The stoner stereotype bullshit is insulting. Keeps perpetuating that people that smoke look and act like this. Fuck the marketing team that came up with this.

- There is a difference between being high and having down’s syndrome.

- Wow!! this is EXACTLY what being high is like!

- What a totally insulting stereotype they are building in the publics’ mind that anyone who uses cannabis becomes borderline retarded. Folks who doesn’t know better must think you automatically lose 40 IQ points afterwards. What a shame, as it has inspired so much art, beauty, and productive work by responsible users, who are unjustly subjected to this demonetization.

- Isn’t it great when people who don’t blaze it act like they know what it’s like?

The spelling mistakes were left “as is” and like I was saying “make of it what you will.”

This man wants to start his own state.
 
As I hail from a rural agricultural town, I completely understand the political disaffection of country life, and I think a lot of it is merited. Almost no one can make a living on a family farm, and the regions are frequently economically depressed, their problems largely ignored by urbanites. Moreover, that fresh, clean, country air is not always so fresh, since the “not in my backyard” environmental policies in this country meant I grew up around factories. These steel mills intended to bring jobs, though they paid poorly.

That being said, some disaffected country folk are just super-insular, unsophisticated batshit crazy crackpot nutjobs, with no concept of their political or economic relationship to the world around them.

Take, for example, Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway. In early May, Conway attempted to evade state gun control laws, arguing that Weld County law holds more water. Weld County is actually a “home rule” county, meaning they can pass local laws and establish their own internal government structure, but only within the limits of state laws, obviously.

Before that, Conway made a stir pushing for hydrofracking, a gas-drilling technique associated with earthquakes that has left quite a few folks with flammable tap water.  He also argued against emissions standards during an undignified appearance on The Scooter McGee Show (whose tagline is “Paranoia IS patriotic,” and show summary is “Is there a New World Order agenda? Can we stop Globalism? Anything goes and all bets are off when it comes to the TRUTH behind the stories of the headlines of the day!”).

More recent attempts to curb oil and gas drilling with green energy programs as substitutes appear to have been the last straw for this great leader of men and his fellow pioneers.

Between environmental regulation and gun control (in addition to what I’m sure is some weird internalized nostalgia for the American “frontier” and/or libertarian isolation fetish) Conway and other CO county commissioners (and including pols from Nebraska) think they have a case to push for secession, not from America, but from Colorado and Nebraska because they don’t believe in the laws. These people want to make their own state. According to Detroit Free Press, “North Colorado” (I can’t believe I just typed that), would take about 7% of Colorado’s overall population, making it the least populous state in the country. The second least populous, Wyoming, would still have 40% more people. It would be, as you might be expect, overwhelmingly white, Republican and have an incredibly low gross domestic product.

What could possibly go wrong?

Below, a local news report on the proposed new state of “North Colorado”—that’s sure some nutty hairpiece Sean Conway’s got, isn’t it?