We found a vegan haven at Durango may have quite a few places to get snacks, but few of them cater primarily to people with restricted diets. At Mountain Munchies, however, vegans and those who are gluten- or dairy-free can find food to fit their lifestyles

Mountain Munchies provides tasty, local, vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free snacks But was the vegan green chile ice cream just temporary?

Nick Gonzales/DGO Nick Gonzales/DGO » The shaved ice at Mountain Munchies (including this piña » The Falafel Waffle, Mountain Munchies’ flagship snack, with green chile colada one) is vegan ... like ... normal? (*Squints suspiciously*) tzatziki.

Nick Gonzales/DGO » Mountain Munchies’ artisan vegan green chile ice cream. (Insert gif of James Franco saying “So good,” in “Spider-Man 3” here.)

Durango may have quite a few places to get snacks, but few of them cater primarily to people with restricted diets. At Mountain Munchies, however, vegans and those who are gluten- or dairy-free can find food to fit their lifestyles.

The eatery held its grand opening on Sept. 16 at 3701 Main Ave.

We dropped by during its soft opening phase right before that date and walked off with a handful of treats.

Always great deals & the best selection in town!

The business describes itself as “the home of ‘THE’ Falafel Waffle,” so we got one of those. The item is exactly what it sounds like — a falafel pressed into the shape of a little waffle, with the squareshaped surface impressions and all that. It is then topped by local greens and microgreens, tomatoes, carrots, cucumber, and either a vegan chive tahini or a green chile tzatziki (that isn’t dairy-free). It otherwise hits all three of those aforementioned diet restrictions (it occurs to us that if it’s vegan, it’s dairy-free by definition) and you can add roasted gold beets or sweet peppers to it for $1.

If you like falafel and, well ... vegetables, you’ll almost certainly enjoy it. We got it with the green chile tzatziki and liked both the waffle itself and that the veggies tasted fresh in the way where you know they were grown somewhere nearby. It’s relatively small and not super filling — we’d never order it as a replacement for a meal — but it’d be great if you’re looking for something tasty to hold you over at say, 3 p.m.

We also ordered a pint of artisan vegan green chile ice cream. It was displayed prominently on the pre-opening menu and we had to try it. If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that we absolutely love green chiles, and you can give them to us in pretty much any form. This includes vegan ice cream, it turns out. The ice cream had the consistency of a sorbet, but was, in fact, creamy. If we had to guess, the “cream” of it all comes from some form of plant-based milk. The flavor was not unlike a green chile dip if you replaced the sour cream part with non-dairy milk. And froze it. It was all we could do not to eat the entire pint in one sitting.

We’re a bit worried, though. As we write this, we’re looking at Mountain Munchies’ official menu and ... the green chile ice cream isn’t on it. There’s artisan vegan ice cream (which is also gluten-free for what it’s worth), and it comes in 14 flavors — including wild blueberry & lavender, salted caramel, Palisade peaches & cream, apple cinnamon, and matcha, which all sound great — but our favorite capsicum cultivar ain’t one of them. Maybe it will come back later on.

Last but not least, we grabbed some piña colada-flavored shaved ice. It tasted exactly as you’d expect. While we were eating it, though, we noticed that the menu notes that the shaved ice is also vegan and gluten-free. Since then, we’ve been doing our best to avoid thinking of the kind of shaved ice that would contain animal products. (Wait ... does the blood of a tiger actually taste like strawberry, coconut, and watermelon?)

Now that MM is officially open, we’ll be headed back to try its hummuses and “paleo skittles” (dehydrated strawberry, raspberry, carrot, blueberry, lemon, and pear, apparently). We’ll also be keeping an eye out for that delicious green chile ice cream.

[food/drink] Durango Craft Spirits has some new bourbons aging, and we’re excited

Blue corn and single malt bourbons should release in 2022

Fans of local whiskey, we’ve got something to look forward to ... albeit in about 1.75 years. Durango Craft Spirits has two new spirits aging — a blue corn bourbon and a single malt bourbon — both of which should be ready in 2022, according to co-owner and distiller Michael McCardell. The limited releases will join the brewery’s existing Soiled Doves Vodka, Mayday Moonshine, and Cinder Dick Bourbon. If you’ve never had blue corn before (in which case, live a little and vary your tortilla chip purchases for goodness’ sake), it tends to have a sweeter and nuttier flavor than yellow or white corn, and in our experience, those qualities actually survive the brewing or distilling process. Beer drinkers can find a number of blue corn beers — even within our immediate region. The blue corn in this particular spirit comes from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s Bow & Arrow farms in Towaoc. The rest of the ingredients in both liquors come from Colorado Malting Company in Alamosa. The blue corn spirit is heavily wheated, with a little bit of rye and a two-row malt, he said. He has put away eight barrels of the stuff this year and plans to do the same in 2021. And, if you’re curious, it’s aging in new American white

If you decided to pick up gardening as your chosen COVID-19 hobby, you might be considering what to do with all that extra produce you just harvested. Sure you could give it to friends and family, but perhaps consider donating that overflow since you’re so #blessed.

Thanks to a Colorado non-profit called Fresh Food Connect, you can use that new hobby to do some good for your community. Fresh Food Connect allows for gardeners to donate produce from their plots that they don’t think they’ll use. The non-profit volunteers will pick up any food you decide to donate and then hand it off to one of their food distribution partners. The distribution centers then get the produce out to wherever it is needed.

Jerry McBride/BCI Media » Michael McCardell, distiller and co-owner of Durango Craft Spirits, is currently aging a blue corn bourbon using blue corn from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s Bow and Arrow farms.

oak heavy-charred barrels. McCardell prefers heavily charred barrels because they bring out different flavors and add some smokiness and a slight hint of cinnamon. “It’s real fun to work with ... it smells nice,” McCardell said about the blue corn. He had planned to make a blue corn bourbon even before he opened up shop in downtown Durango five years ago,

“The more users we have on the gardening side, the more folks we can get the food to and the more we can serve the community,” Helen Katich, who runs Fresh Food Connect, told Westword. As far as donating to the program, you should “garden and think about the abundance and what you can share.”

When Fresh Food Connect first began in 2016, it focused on delivering fresh foods to Denver neighborhoods. However, as they began to partner with food rescue and hunger relief organizations, they spread chapters all over Colorado, even as far as Durango.

“This program is for (the) community by community,” Katich said. “These groups are really phenomenal.” he said, and was inspired to do so again recently as other craft distilleries have started experimenting with exotic corn varieties. “It’s really surprised me that this blue corn had such a high starch content, which of course produces more sugar and produces more alcohol. The taste of it is really a little bit on the sweet side, and it tastes just fantastic,” he said. In its current unaged and undiluted

With the effects of COVID, Fresh Food Connect is currently looking for more distribution partners to spread its reach. Because of COVID-19, many people are stuck at home rummaging for ways to occupy their time and have resorted to new hobbies like gardening. In fact, the trend blew up so much that consumers depleted many seed companies’ supply of products.

“It’s the largest volume of orders we have seen,” one seed supplier told the Washington Post. At one point, his company processed about 4,500 orders a day, double the usual demand which peaks in the spring. The supplier even closed their website for three days and stopped taking any orders so staff could catch up with the long backlog of orders. form (as it sits in the barrels, it’s at a considerably higher proof than that at which McCardell plans to release it), the whiskey is indeed sweet and has a soft, almost pillowy mouthfeel. He attributes this to the wheat in it. It tastes completely unlike DCS’s Cinder Dick Bourbon. McCardell is hoping that it will be ready to distribute in the early summer of 2022. The single malt, on the other hand, will likely be ready in December 2022. He began making it last year, and in its current, also undiluted form, it has a butterscotch-iness to it, at least on the palate. McCardell plans to make about 500 bottles of the single malt and 2,500 of the blue corn bourbon per year for the foreseeable future. As you can probably tell, the single malt will be a bit more exclusive than the blue corn bourbon or the distillery’s existing spirits. We’re fans of DCS’s existing spirits (even the vodka has a taste that we enjoy — and we’re really not vodka drinkers), so we can’t wait to try out the finished versions of the new bourbons. But we have to get through the entirety of 2021 and then some first. So for now, we wait.

Have you done a bunch of COVID-19 gardening? Consider giving your homegrown produce to Fresh Food Connect

— Nick Gonzales

While COVID’s impact has obviously been negative in many ways, this new interest in activities like gardening resulted in a sea of new opportunities for organizations like Fresh Food Connect. Now that more people are growing, there’s more food that can be shared amongst people who need it.

“When you look collectively, it’s more than (someone’s) two and a half pounds of food; it turns into something beautiful,” Katich said.

To learn more about how to get involved, visit Fresh Food Connect’s website for more information or download the Fresh Food Connect app. — Amanda Push

[mysteries] Found? Remains at Mesa Verde may be those of hiker missing since 2013

Mitchell Dale Stehling vanished without a trace on what should have been a quarter-mile hike

At 4:30 p.m. on June 9, 2013, Mitchell Dale Stehling set out on the quartermile-long hike to Mesa Verde National Park’s Spruce Tree House ruin. He never returned, sparking a massive search that never yielded any evidence of what happened to him. Until now. After the National Park Service received an anonymous tip on Sept. 16, search and rescue crews found human remains the next day at the location described by the tip, which also indicated that the body might be that of Stehling. Montezuma County Coroner George Deavers told The Durango Herald he is “99%” sure the remains are that of Mitchell Dale Stehling because of items found at the scene: a driver’s license, credit cards, and a Social Security card that had Stehling’s information on it. Barring that 1% possibility that somebody else died in the park but somehow ended up with Stehling’s possessions, this puts an end to one of the strangest mysteries in the modern history of Mesa Verde. Stehling, his wife, and his parents, of Goliad, Texas, were on a road trip visiting national parks when they stopped at Mesa Verde. The Stehling family had originally planned to stop at just the lookout points and admire views of the ruins from a distance, but after watching a video on it, Dale decided to explore the Spruce Tree House, the third largest and best-preserved ruin in the park. When he left his family for what should have been a short hike, he was wearing a khaki-colored “Mesa Verde Museum Association” baseball cap, sunglasses, a brown t-shirt, khaki shorts, and brown walking shoes. The only items he was carrying were his cell phone, cigarettes, and his wallet. He also left without water on a day when the temperature exceeded 100 degrees. Dale had his phone on him, but authorities were unable to get a signal from it after his disappearance. According to phone records, he tried to access his voicemail at about 7 p.m. on the evening

Courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service » Mitchell Dale Stehling went missing in June 2013, sparking an intensive two-week search.

Courtesy of Denean Stehling » Denean Stehling and her husband Dale posed for this photo before he left on a hike to Mesa Verde’s Spruce Tree House, from which he never returned.

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of his disappearance.

After his wife reported him missing, searchers learned from witnesses that Stehling had veered off onto the Petroglyph Point Trail, a 2.5-mile loop that branches off of the Spruce Tree House Trail. The trail he wound up on features a lot of steep switchbacks, narrow stairways, and areas where hikers have to scramble over stones, leading to a panel of petroglyphs about two miles into the hike. After that point, it ascends to the top of the mesa and becomes a simple gravel trail that circles back to the trailhead.

The family that reported that they had seen him saw him twice on the trail, the last time at the petroglyph panel itself. A team of scent dogs showed interest in the area beneath the petroglyphs, but were unable to locate any evidence of what happened to Dale or point search teams in a new direction where he might have gone. At the peak of the intensive two-week search that followed, between 60 and 70 people were searching the park for the missing hiker.

Jodi Peterson, a writer and editor for High Country News, wrote that she hiked the Petroglyph Point Trail the day after Stehling went missing and heard a man in distress. “After an hour of walking, I suddenly heard a weary male voice call ‘I need some help,’” she wrote. Peterson reported what she heard to the park.

The remains found on Sept. 17 were “quite a distance away” from where Stehling was last seen, Mesa Verde National Park Superintendent Cliff Spencer told the Herald. The area, in a remote part of the park, which took search crews about two hours to reach, was searched in 2013 when Stehling went missing.

[costumes] Still celebrating Halloween this year? Here are some COVID-appropriate costume ideas

During a normal year, right about now, a month out is when most of us would be figuring what to wear for Halloween. This year nobody would really blame you if you wanted to skip the holiday altogether. After all, it’s not like you can safely mingle at parties or anything of that nature. Then again, do you have anything better to do?

If you, like us, plan to dress up anyway — even if only to celebrate the season at home, work, or standing slightly obscured behind a tree at the park just after sunset — we have some costume ideas.

The masked

If there’s one article of clothing that has come to define this year, it’s the face mask. And plenty of pop culture characters were wearing them before they were cool, er ... necessary. Sure, many horror villain masks aren’t COVID-19 friendly – Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask and Hannibal Lecter’s mouthpiece both have holes in them around the mouth and nose. But plenty of non-horror characters fit the bill. Adobe Stock image

Ninjas, for instance, are al- » Ninjas are masters most always depicted as cover- of espionage and, it ing the lower half of their faces turns out, not ejecting (and, perhaps, everything but their facial fluids onto their eyes). Want to get more people. specific? The Mortal Kombat video game franchise has at least a dozen masked characters. Whatever you do, just don’t dress up as Scorpion, yell “Get over here!” and pull people toward you with a spear. We’re supposed to be social distancing, people.

If you’re a Marvel fan, a number of full-body costumes, such as Spider-Man and Iron Man come to mind. If you’d rather not cover up everything, the Winter Soldier is a pretty simple DIY costume. The defining characteristics of the look are just shoulder-length hair, a mask that covers your mouth and nose, and a silver arm with a red star near the shoulder. Assemble those and you’re ready to fight Captain America. The magical and mystical

Remember back in January when Durango’s Snowdown organizers announced that the 2021 theme would be “A Magical Mystical Snowdown: We Put a Spell on You”? Oh, what a simpler time. The upcoming winter festival has been canceled, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bust out your robe and wizard hat for Halloween instead. Then, if they decide to carry that theme over to the 2022 event (*fingers crossed that this will all be behind us by then), you can dust off your get- Adobe Stock image up in ... 15 months. » Your upcoming

Harry Potter and Lord of Snowdown plans may the Rings costumes tend to have disappeared in a be multi-layer and a bit warm, puff of smoke, but your perfect for autumn in Colorado. wizard costumes don’t Just resist the urge to dress up have to. like beloved-children’s-authorturned-TERF J.K. Rowling herself. Yeah, it may sound clever at first to combine a Hogwarts robe, a wig, and some sort of transphobic sign/printed tweet, but if nobody gets it, you just look like a transphobe. Do something fun from “Game of Thrones,” “His Dark Materials,” or “Artemis Fowl” instead.

The musical

In the before-times, there used to be places called clubs (OK, not so much in the Four Corners) where you could go to listen and dance as people called “disc jockeys” created music with a catchy beat. (At least we assume they were actually doing something, not just holding headphones to their head, gyrating, and hitting random buttons.)

Some of the most popular DJs adopted personas that completely obscured their faces. Artists like Deadmau5, Marshmello, and Daft Punk all wore some sort of easily-identifiable headpiece.

What’s great about dressing up as any of them is that, for the most part, the helmet/mouse head/white cylinder is the only important part. You can totally get away with just wearing your Courtesy of Q1q2q3qwertz/ casual everyday clothes, or, like, Wikimedia Commons a tracksuit otherwise. If you » Marshmello — want to get real creative, though, an easy but easily make up your own persona. Hey, recognizable celebrity maybe if you learn how to make costume. electronic music too, you’ll find yourself on a new career path.