Nov 25, 2008 — The sixth annual Fantasy Gingerbread House competition and the 28th Annual Tree Lighting Ceremony and fireworks display will kick off the holiday season in Beaver Creek Friday, Nov. 28.

Elaborate gingerbread houses will be displayed and 100 percent of silent auction proceeds will go to Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), a local organization serving...

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Nov 7, 2008 — The Vail Recreation District's (VRD) Imagination Station, Vail's learning and discovery center, will celebrate its annual season opening party from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 8, to showcase the changes it has made over the last year.

Located in the LionsHead parking structure above Subway, the Imagination Station offers children ages 2 through 12 a...

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Aug 23, 2008 — With three boys ranging in age from 20 months to eight years old, I know a thing or two about the state of daycare and preschools in the Vail Valley. Suffice to say, they’re not cheap, but they are generally very high quality.

In an area where single-bread-winner families are a rarity because of the high cost of living and housing, daycare is a hot...

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Jul 27, 2008 — VICKSBURG, Colo. – The question of age wasn’t rattling around too much in my head on the way up 14,067-foot Missouri Mountain Aug. 9 of last year, but it certainly was a source of preoccupation on the way down.

The old climbing cliché, “the summit is only halfway,” never rang truer for me as I reached the top with relative ease...

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Jul 12, 2008 — Eight-year-old Lily DeMuth saw tremendous potential in an oversized bubble gum machine that had been abandoned in her mom’s office.

With a classmate whose mother was being treated for breast cancer, DeMuth wanted to use that machine to raise money for breast cancer awareness. The problem was, she wasn’t making too much money with the machine,...

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Jul 1, 2008 — If you have kids, the Vail Nature Center is the place to be Wednesday nights throughout July as the Vail Recreation District kicks off its Family Fun Night program July 2.

The Wednesday evening programs will feature educational, interactive and entertaining guest speakers from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at an affordable price of $10 for adults, $5 for kids and just $30...

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Jun 10, 2008 — When I looked up, my nephew was thirty feet in the air, moving like a pint-sized Spiderman toward the top of the kid’s climbing wall. By the time I took another bite of his birthday cake-flavored ice cream (which I was happily holding for him), he was down again, running toward me, and pulling me toward the kid’s kayaking pool.

I’ve been to...

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Jun 1, 2008 — My ignominious career as a mountain bike racer ended with a whimper more than a decade ago when I came to the stark realization that full suspension was not in my near future.

A tennis-shoe racer who never quite graduated to clip-ins, I just couldn’t justify paying more for my bike than my car. But guys I was burying on the climbs in the local race...

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Apr 30, 2008 — My family pulled off an interesting duathlon on Memorial Day last year, running in the Bolder Boulder that morning then catching a 1 p.m. Rockies game at Coors Field.

Based on the number of "Run to Live" T-shirts at the ballpark, we weren't the only ones who had the idea. But I daresay we had some of the youngest participants in what turned out to be a very...

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Feb 21, 2008 — There’s a run in Vail’s Game Creek Bowl named Lost Boy after a 14-year-old who in the 1980s mistakenly skied into the bowl before it was part of the ski area and wound up spending the night in a snow cave before being rescued the next day.

That accidental backcountry adventure had a happy ending, but it’s a great reminder of how...

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