ASPEN, Colo.—Klaus Obermeyer celebrated his 99th birthday in Aspen recently with a Bavarian band, servings of apfelstrudel mit schlag and scores of friends, family, and co-workers.
The celebrated purveyor of winter sporting wear was in his customary good cheer when Scott Condon of The Aspen Times later caught up with him.
"There's so much new. It's a dynamic world that we're living in and dancing in, which makes it very wonderful," he explained. "It never gets to wondering, 'Oh, what should we do next?' There's always opportunity to make things better."
Obermeyer, who founded Sport Obermeyer in 1947, said a fundamental operating principle for the company, as for his life, has been to "create win-win situations. Never make a win-lose. That keeps everybody happy. Our suppliers are happy, our dealers are happy, and consumers are happy. So whatever it takes to get a win-win, that's kind of the thing to do."
In longevity, it helps to have good genes. A great-grandfather of his lived to be 112. If he lives to 103, he will have skied for 100 years. He takes care not to eat more food than he can burn off in exercise. He swims a half-mile every day, very slow, breast-stroke and on his back, half of it.
"I think we (receive) by nature a gift by having a body. If we don't use it, it goes to hell, so it's really important to keep using it. Do pushups and whatever you can to keep it going."
The near-centenarian also testifies to the virtue of aikido, the martial arts discipline. "In aikido, you don't hurt your partner, you control your partner," he explained. "If you hurt him, he may come back two days later and hit you with a two-by-four. Aikido brings about peace. Aikido exists spiritually as well as physically. The older you get, the more you use of the spiritual part and a little less on the mat."
Obermeyer also spoke to the Times about the importance of intentionality in life. "It's kind of like a dance on a floor that's moving. But you always end up where you aim for. Aim is a very important thing in one's life. If you aim up Aspen Mountain, you're not going to get up Red Mountain. It's a powerful thing," he said.
Making wolves more afraid?
COOKE CITY, Mont.—To see wildlife in Yellowstone you need to go to the Lamar Valley, on the park's northeast side, where there are buffalo aplenty but also wolves.
And so it was several years ago that two Colorado visitors rounded a bend in the road to see a mob, 80 or so people, both young and old, their most common denominator being optical equipment glued to their eyes. These were the wolf watchers and, when they had squeezed their Subaru through them and joined their ranks, there were wolves lounging thereabouts in the relative heat of a warm October afternoon.
The wolf pack kept its distance there, along Pebble Creek, until the shadows grew long, then one by one, and by pairs, they arced their bodies across the road 100 metres or so from the wolf-watchers and vanished into the dark timber and the coming dark of night.
These wolves seemed wary, given their circumstances. Nobody will shoot them in Yellowstone National Park, but just a few kilometres away, outside the park boundary in Montana, there's a hunting season for wolves. Montana allows up to four wolves to be killed annually.
The Jackson Hole News&Guide said it's among the most conservative harvest quotas in a state that does not cap harvests in most areas. But it's too many in the mind of Deby Dixon, who lives in Gardiner, Mont., and told the story of a wolf called 926F that was habituated to people such as the wolf watchers of the Lamar Valley. It was legally killed near Cooke City.
Doug Smith, the senior wildlife biologist in Yellowstone, told the News&Guide he wanted to adopt tactics that cause wolves to be more wary of people. Now, when he and others see wolves crossing the road, he leaves them alone. He'd like a new policy that condones hazing wolves, using either paintballs or beanbag guns.
The National Park Service in 2002 looked into the issue. At that time, Smith was among those who concluded that aversive conditioning and hazing wouldn't be effective at reversing the behaviour of Yellowstone's 100 wolves who, when they wandered outside the park, weren't wary enough of people pointing guns, not cameras, at them.
