Where the Bison
(Not Buffalo) Roam
Meet DEN's Closest Neighbors

Cleaning Windows and Fabric
DEN's Roof Gets Cleaned

International Travel
Seven Steps for Smooth Travel

Planes, Trains, and Passengers
Behind the Scenes with
DEN's Train Team

Where the Bison (Not Buffalo) Roam

Meet DEN's Closest Neighbors

Denver International Airport doesn’t have many neighbors. But just over the fence west of Peña Boulevard is a neighbor that you can visit to see the area’s most important natural asset—wildlife.

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge, about 12 miles west of DEN (easily reached on 56th Avenue), is literally across the street from a large Denver suburb. At 17,000 acres (nearly 27 square miles), it is the largest continuous open space in the metropolitan area. “You can really get lost out here,” confirms Stacy Armitage, education specialist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), which manages 554 refuges across the United States. Armitage and her USFWS colleagues oversee 12,000 refuge acres at the arsenal.

“People can bring their families out and hike for free,” Armitage says. “Or take part in any one of our nature programs. We have the wildlife-viewing tours. Or they can just come to the visitor’s center and look at the exhibits there.”

The deer, hawks, eagles, coyotes, raccoons, and other wildlife on the property (more than 330 species total) once shared the space with the U.S. Army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a chemical weapons plant. The Army had purchased 17,000 acres of farmland during World War II to build a complex to make chemical weapons as a military deterrent. Then the Army leased the arsenal for commercial pesticide production. In 1982, operations at the arsenal stopped and, five years later, a massive cleanup of contaminated habitat began.

In 1992, the secretary of the Interior designated the property as a national wildlife refuge. As acres are cleaned, they are transferred to the USFWS. The Army is scheduled to hand over an additional 3,000 acres once cleanup of its property is complete.

In place of a large manufacturing complex, the arsenal now has miles of grassland, interspersed with fringe sage, rabbitbrush and sorghum. Part of the ongoing transformation is returning some of the habitat back to native prairie. “We’re just trying to get it back to when the Native Americans were here,” says Armitage.

An estimated 750 deer roam arsenal land. If your timing is serendipitous, you might see does leading spotted fawns from one part of the prairie to the next, or you could spot mule deer bucks eating greens alongside a road, unconcerned by human traffic.

Bison (buffalo is a misnomer that is sure to annoy a zoologist) are new arsenal residents, part of a pilot program. Sixteen bison arrived on St. Patrick’s Day, in effect returning home, because their ancestors ambled across this same landscape.

Armitage says the bison program is important not only to conserve the species, since few genetically pure bison exist, but also as a management tool. “They are so important to the prairie ecosystem, just like fire was.” The arsenal bison have 1,460 acres to graze and explore, which works out to about 77 acres per animal. This spring, bison cows gave birth to three calves—two males and one female—so the new herd now numbers 19. If the bison pilot program succeeds, the refuge hopes to increase the size of the herd.

“They look very docile, but they are a wild animal,” says Armitage. “They can run upwards of 35 miles per hour for extended periods of time.”

The wildlife refuge has nine miles of trails, including a new trail around Lake Ladora. Trails begin from the visitor’s center, beyond which no cars are allowed. The refuge operates wildlife viewing tours, conducted by volunteers, from a motorized tram on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays at 10 a.m.

“It is really neat to see the kids in the surrounding communities out in the natural world,” says Armitage, “because some of them have never been in a natural world.”

Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is a precious natural world—an oasis, and it is right next door to the nation’s largest airport.

Contact Information
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is open to the public from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (excluding holidays) on: Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday.

The Visitor Center is open on these days from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Call (303) 289-0930 to reserve a Wildlife Viewing Tour, given on Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday.

Visit http://www.fws.gov/rockymountainarsenal/visitors/nature.htm for information on the refuge’s nature programs.

To Get There:
From DEN, take Peña Blvd to exit 2 for 56th Ave. Turn right at E. 56th Ave. until you reach Havana St. You will see the Rocky Mountain Arsenal on your right. Turn in at the gate at 56th and Havana and proceed forward following any posted directions.

Cleaning Windows and Fabric

DEN's Roof Gets Cleaned

Costa Rica

New nonstop flight from Denver to San José, Costa Rica

If you are dreaming of a journey that takes you to volcanoes, or to rain forests, or to view exotic wildlife, your timing couldn’t be better.

Frontier Airlines is inaugurating a nonstop flight between Denver and San José, Costa Rica, four times a week, beginning Nov. 30, 2007. San José will be Denver International Airport’s 19th international destination, and Denver’s first nonstop to a Central American city. It is the ninth Latin American city for Frontier, which already flies to eight cities in México.

San José, Costa Rica’s capital, is 3,750 feet (1,150 meters) above sea level in the central valley between three volcanic mountain ranges. The mean year-round temperature in San José is 75 degrees F.

Four million residents live in this small country, half in the capital. Costa Rica has been a democracy for more than 100 years, and for almost half a century it has had no army. Costa Ricans are largely of Spanish descent, but there are some Nicaraguan immigrants and English-speaking descendants of 19th-century Jamaican workers, who are clustered on the Caribbean coast.

About the size of Virginia, Costa Rica is a sliver of land that separates the Caribbean Sea from the Pacific Ocean. A trip from Limón on the Caribbean Coast to Puntarenas on the country’s Pacific side is only 153 miles.

The country has more than 60 volcanoes; most are extinct, but seven are in a fitful sleep, awakening sporadically.The grano de oro, or golden bean – what native Costa Ricans call the coffee bean – has been a prime commodity since the early 19th century. The country also produces and exports bananas, pineapples, sugar, oranges, rice, ornamental plants, and other items.

Costa Rica has a wealth of wildlife and is a botanical wonderland. Several species of sea turtles lay eggs on protected beaches, and the rare quetzal – a beautiful bird with iridescent emerald plumage, a crimson belly, white tail, and long green tail plumes – is a cloud-forest inhabitant and is endangered.

International Travel

Seven Steps for Smooth Travel

When planning an international trip, you want to make sure it is a pleasurable and relaxing experience for everyone involved. As you decide where to go, you should extensively research your country of choice to avoid unexpected surprises once you have embarked on your journey. During your preparation, the following steps can serve as an additional guide to help ensure that everything goes smoothly throughout your trip.

Step 1
Getting your passport and visa. If you don’t have a passport, apply for one at least six months before your trip. All children regardless of age, (including newborns) must have their own passport. Remember that passports are required for travel anywhere outside of the United States – including Mexico and Canada. For application locations, visit http://iafdb.travel.state.gov/. If a visa is required, obtain it from the foreign consular representative of the country you are visiting, and allow sufficient time for processing your application. For specific details, consult the embassy or consulate of the country you plan to visit.

Step 2
Contact consulate. It is a good idea to visit the Department of State’s Consular Information Web site to learn rules, regulations, health and security conditions, and other information specific to the region where you will be traveling. If staying longer than one month, you may want to register with the U.S. Embassy or Consulate. More information can be found at http://usembassy.state.gov/.

Step 3
Medication. Bring copies of your prescriptions, as well as their generic names, and pack them in your carry-on luggage. Due to strict Customs regulations, some medications (particularly over-the-counter medications) that are available in the U.S. may be considered illegal substances in other countries. Check (well in advance of your departure) with the country’s embassy in case you need to obtain a permit. You should also contact your health insurance company before you leave and go to the International Travel and Health Web site to obtain a list of each country’s vaccination requirements. http://www.who.int/ith/countries/en.

Step 4
Money. Bring travelers’ checks, one or two major credit cards, and a very small amount of cash. Call your credit card companies in advance to notify them of the dates the cards will be used internationally, and photocopy the cards in case they are lost or stolen. Before departure, you can exchange your U.S. currency at DEN’s money exchanges on Concourses A or B, and Level 5 of Jeppesen Terminal.

Step 5
At the airport. Check in for your flight at least 2.5 hours prior to departure, and even earlier during peak travel times such as holidays. Keep all documentation: your ticket, passport, visa (if required), and valid photo identification (i.e., driver’s license) close at hand. You will be asked to show them several times during the process of getting your boarding pass, going through security, and boarding your flight.

Step 6
On the flight. Long international flights can be uncomfortable and cause jet lag. Some prevention ideas are: stretch and walk every hour, drink a lot of water, limit consumption of alcohol, wear loose clothing, and change your watch to the new time zone as soon as you are settled in your seat.

Step 7
Returning home. On your flight back to the United States you will be required to fill out various Customs declaration forms. Have these forms completed before deplaning. Go to http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/vacation/ for information on Customs regulations.

International Packing Travel Tips

• As soon as you receive your passport and/or visa, check it to make sure no mistakes were made
  
• Make copies of your passport, visa, and credit cards before you go, leaving one copy for family, and keeping the other copy with you but separate from the originals
  
• Bring medical documents, and have your doctor prepare a medical history for a foreign doctor if you have any special health problems
• Ask your doctor or pharmacist for the generic drug names, because foreign countries might use different names than the United States
• Leave a copy of your itinerary with friends and family, so you can easily be reached in case of an emergency
• Clearly label each piece of luggage and remove old destination tags to avoid confusion
• Pack envelopes so you can keep all receipts together during your trip, making Customs as smooth as possible during your return
• Don’t pack more than you’ll need
• Don’t pack anything valuable, fragile, or perishable
• Pack a translator and a currency converter
• Be prepared for the weather by checking temperature listings at www.weather.com
• Take lots of photos and have fun!
  

Betty Woodman at Denver International Airport

Chorus Lines in Clay

Betty Woodman‘s art is Auntie Mame throwing a party, or fireworks bursting over New York Harbor, or the climax of Bolero at the Hollywood Bowl.

In Woodman’s hands, clay is gregarious, and its decoration, exuberant.

“Betty Woodman is an important artist who happens to use clay as her medium,” says Gwen Chanzit, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum. “She’s pushed clay into the realms of painting, into relief, into sculpture, into the round, and even into architectural forms. She makes clay flow and bend.”

Her art is included in 40 international collections, including those of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) and Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

But, if you don’t live in those cities, you can see her work by traveling through Denver International Airport.

Four groups of her ceramic balustrades are installed in the center atrium of DEN’s Jeppesen Terminal, on the upper level adjacent to the escalators.

“Her lyrical vessels are an original and unique response to the terminal’s grand space, playing on the shapes of the tensile roofline and the scale of the modern architecture,” says Colleen Fanning, DEN’s art program administrator.

In Woodman’s work, the vessel is central. A holder of water, grain, wine, oil, and other goods, the vessel is an essential receptacle in most cultures. Her ceramic vessels are usually in the form of vases which, Woodman says, “have a reference to the whole history of ceramics” in terms of shapes and decorations.

“So, as much as I am looking at traditional vases,” she explains, “I’m also looking at modernist painting, or perhaps looking at Japanese screen painting, or perhaps looking at fabric samples. So, I’m sort of looking at everything.”

Art critics were especially impressed with her first-ever retrospective at the Met in 2006. New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl said the 77-year-old artist “is an omnivore of ceramics traditions, among them Etruscan pots, Italian majolica, the Baroque, Tang-dynasty glaze techniques, Islamic tiles, Okinawan folk pottery, and Moorish-Spanish ware.”

New York Times writer Grace Glueck said Woodman has given the vase “spectacular new life” in contemporary art. Her work both challenges and invokes the traditional elements of vase and vesselhood so imaginatively that it lives in a class by itself.”

Woodman says that ceramics throughout history have never been purely functional; there was always a decorative element. “I think that my work just kind of evolved into being not only about function but about other things—about color, about shapes,” she says. “Then, I think I became very interested in having a surface that I could decorate; a surface big enough that I could do something with it.”

Although Woodman enjoys the entire process of making ceramics, she thinks the most creative moment is decorating her pieces. “I’m interested in how you can paint on a three-dimensional object,” she explains. “How I can take two disparate pieces and by the way I paint on them, make them into one—make your eye jump across that space as one.”

Woodman first started shaping, glazing, and baking clay when she was Betty Abrahams, a Boston high school student. She studied ceramics at Alfred University’s School for American Craftsmen in New York, where an influential teacher would tell her to “try it and see,” every time she asked if she could do something different with her ceramics.

After graduating in 1950, Abrahams returned to Boston, setting up a studio and teaching pottery classes. One of her pupils was George Woodman, a freshman at Harvard. Three years later, they married.

The Woodmans moved to Albuquerque where George studied for a master’s degree in painting at the University of New Mexico. Betty set up a studio in Old Town and began to make and sell lusterware. The University of Colorado then hired George to teach painting and aesthetics, so he and Betty moved to Boulder. She taught pottery at the City of Boulder Parks and Recreation Department, and she worked on pieces in a studio she built on their sun porch.

They raised a family, and Betty continued to teach and to work on her own pottery, which George would decorate. In the early 1970s, Betty began to decorate her own work. By 1978, she was teaching spring semesters at the University of Colorado and the Woodmans were dividing their time between Boulder, New York City, and Italy.

Italy has always been important to her. She worked and studied there several times before she and her husband bought a farmhouse near Florence in the late 1960s. Since then, the Woodmans have returned there every summer and now spend half the year there. “I think living in Italy has affected my work a lot,” she says, but admits it is hard to express the effects in words.

Art critic and author Janet Koplos believes Woodman is consistently unpredictable. “She seems to have freely addressed every aspect of the ceramic form: studying, considering, imagining how she can alter it.”

Woodman wants her audiences to go around her vases. Her Day and Night Triptych, for example, has predominantly black glazes on one side of the vases, but the opposite sides have a light palette. As a result, the pieces look like a different set of vases.

In twos or threes (which she calls diptychs or triptychs) her vases might interact as couples or a small group. When there are more than three, they can become a chorus line that doubles as a balustrade, or become a pyramid that evokes a cargo of ancient earthenware jars.

Not only does Woodman want you to look around her work but also between the forms.

“The space in-between the vessels becomes as important as the actual shape of the vessel,” she says. When you study the pieces, she believes, “suddenly you become aware of the shapes around and in between the vases.”

Her DEN balustrades illustrate how vibrant her colors can be, how freely the idea of a vase can be expressed, and how the space between each vase can be integral to the overall design of her work.

For the Denver International Airport project, she used a studio at the University of Colorado to make the 28 vases and hired students to help her. The balustrades had to be a specific uniform height, so she experimented with clays and kiln temperatures until she found the perfect clay.

Woodman threw the vases on the potter’s wheel and cut out their appendages from wet clay. The wing-like pieces were attached, and the assembled vases then had to dry slowly, for two or three weeks, so they wouldn’t crack.

She chose her palette of colors for each of the four vase groups and decorated each group as if it were a single composition. Woodman says it took three to four months to finish the balustrades, and they were installed in DEN’s terminal atrium in 1993, before the airport opened.

“My idea, which was a mistaken idea on my part, was that it would be very nice if people could run their hand on the [balustrade] railing, so that it was something they could touch. The tactile property of the ceramic—it’s so nice,” she says.

The airport soon discovered, however, that hundreds of curious passengers touching the fragile balustrades daily were damaging the pieces. Her sculptures are now behind protective glass barriers, and travelers can still marvel at her whimsical shapes and bright colors.

One has only to look at her art to realize Woodman has bridged the gap between craft and art.

“I think we’re still trying to liberate creative people from those categories,” Denver Art Museum Curator Chanzit said. “Betty Woodman’s work shows us how unnecessary those categories are."

When Children Fly

What you should do to prepare

• Contact your airline for information about juvenile passengers and for procedures governing children flying alone. Each airline has its own policies for fares and services. Also check to find out what ID requirements your airline has for juvenile passengers.

• Consult the www.tsa.gov/travelers Web site before traveling for a complete list of items allowed as carry-on. Currently, items allowed include reasonable amounts of baby formula and milk, baby food, teething gels, and pacifiers. This list will also include the procedure to carry on medications.

Consider:

• Bringing toys, puzzles, books, etc., for entertainment
• Reserving a window seat for your child
• Bringing chewing gum or ear plugs to help with ear discomfort associated with cabin pressure
  
• Bringing enough diapers for your flight
  
• If you need a baby meal, request it when making flight reservations
  

Is your child flying solo?

• Coordinate and plan ahead! It is your airline that will determine whether you may go to the departure/arrival gate with an unaccompanied minor. Check in advance to understand the services your carrier offers (services vary from airline to airline).
• Make sure your child has all necessary documentation such as tickets, identification, emergency contact telephone numbers, name, address and phone number of person picking the child up at the destination airport.
  
• Review trip itineraries and explain all aspects of the trip to the child before arriving at the airport.

More information to help you prepare is available on the Denver International Airport Web site www.flydenver.com.

Planes, Trains, and Passengers

Behind the Scenes with DEN's Train Team

Denver International Airport, which will handle nearly 50 million passengers this year, is one of the largest and busiest airports in the world. It’s a bit more than a mile from DEN’s Jeppesen Terminal to the most distant concourse, Concourse C. But the trip takes less than five minutes, thanks to a state-of-the-art automated people-mover system that carries passengers and employees from the terminal to the three airside concourses.

“The train,” as the system is known, is a safe and efficient way of moving travelers to and from their gates at DEN. “The train makes it easy to navigate from the gates to the terminal,” said Gary Blessitt, a business traveler from Georgia. “Not to mention, it is better than walking.” Because the train is the only way to move passengers between the terminal and Concourses B and C, its reliability is critical to the airport’s operation. To maintain that reliability, certified professionals monitor the train’s operation 24/7 from positions in DEN’s Maintenance Control and the three airside concourses.

The Communications Center and Maintenance Control combine to form the “nerve center” of DEN, monitoring all of the airport’s critical functions, including emergency situations. In Maintenance Control, an area designated for monitoring the train operation contains video screens, audio equipment, and computerized train maps. Two certified central control operators employed by DEN contractor Bombardier Transportation can provide immediate response to any unexpected issues.

An extra benefit of the train is that it can serve as a security tool in certain situations. If a passenger carrying a prohibited item gets through one of the three security-screening checkpoints in the terminal, a breach alarm is sounded. The alarm rings into the train-control area in Maintenance Control and the trains are immediately stopped, preventing the breach from spreading into the airport’s sterile areas.

The central control operators in Maintenance Control oversee the entire train system and have an enormous amount of responsibility. Not only do they immediately resolve emergency situations, but they maintain a positive flow of passengers through the train stations by adjusting the train schedules to fit the volume of travelers. Sokhorn “Khan” Chhim, DEN contract manager of the train system, said if a technician sees a build-up of passengers waiting for the train, he or she can adjust the trains to ensure passengers quickly get through the system.

“Safety and efficiency are our greatest concerns,” Chhim said, which is why there are so many redundancies in the system. There are back-ups for the central computers in Maintenance Control, the battery power supply, and for each concourse computer. Chhim also noted that “the trains can be directed to bypass problem areas on the tracks, and even though computers control the system, the technicians can override and manually take the system over.”

Maintenance Control is the central point for train operations at DEN, but the hands-on work of keeping the train cars operating smoothly takes place at the train maintenance center. Teamwork is the key element in this large facility located at the end of the tracks past Concourse C. Transit mechanic Karen Cairns, who has been working at DEN for Bombardier and its predecessors since before the airport opened, said, “When you transport as many people as the airport does a day, things can pile up quickly if we are not one well-working team.”

These certified technicians undergo extensive training. Certification requires each employee to complete one six-month class, two 18-month classes, and 10 comprehensive tests. During this time, each student works with a certified operator on DEN’s live system until they have passed each of their tests, which takes about five years.

Inside the maintenance center there are three tracks including a test track where light maintenance is performed on cars while electricity on the track is turned off. For more labor-intensive jobs, such as heavy routine maintenance checks, cars can be taken off the track and jacked up, just like at an auto mechanic’s garage.

The maintenance team is also responsible for all work done on the entire system, making necessary repairs and washing it once a week. Projects and repairs must be strategically planned so that required work can be finished during the four hours every night when the train is operated in a one-track shuttle mode, freeing the other track for repairs and maintenance.

Additionally, all train employees are cross-trained, meaning each worker can do a colleague’s work. John Bolosan, a transit mechanic who has been working on the DEN trains for eight years, said, “In five days, you may work in central control, as a recovery technician on Concourses A, B, and C, troubleshoot problems in the tunnel, and be assigned to the shop to work on defective vehicles.”

Working together through the years, DEN and Bombardier have been able to serve the rapid passenger growth the airport has experienced. Going forward, the airport train team is committed to continuing to provide a safe, seamless, and pleasurable experience for all users.

Faces of Denver International Airport

Stacy Corbett
Property Management Office

DEN Calendar

What will it look like this year?

That’s the question people are asking. The suspense begins every fall as the marketing staff at Denver International Airport puts the final touches on the eagerly anticipated DEN Desk Calendar.

First published in 2002, a new calendar is created each year featuring new photographs taken by our staff photographer. And for the first time, DEN is offering one to you. E-mail your mailing address to marketing@diadenver.net and we’ll send you a copy.

(Calendars will be mailed in December 2007 while supplies last. One calendar per address please.)