Years ago while visiting Colorado Springs, we came upon a monument to honor the 50th anniversary of the Boy Scouts. They had their Jamboree in Colorado Springs that year. We have a picture of my son, who at the time was a Boy Scout, next to the monument.  Fast forward 18 years, I have moved to the Springs and my son, who is now a Boy Scout Leader, came to visit and wanted to find the monument to take another picture as it is the Boy Scouts 100th anniversary. We were told it was in the parking lot of a store on Jamboree Circle. We searched for almost an hour and could not find it.  Could you please tell us exactly where it is.
— Pat Sonzogni

ANSWER: You were close — and Jamboree seemed the obvious choice – but you needed to go to the intersection of Voyager and Briargate parkways. It’s in the same area as the statues of the Briargate horses and is a boulder with a plaque.

Because of your question and since Mayor Lionel Rivera has declared 2010 “The Year of the Boy Scouts” in Colorado Springs, honoring the 100th anniversary, it was fun taking a look back at the Jamboree.

It was July 22-29, 1960 and was on thousands of acres that were north of the city at that time, near the Air Force Academy.

Scouts from every state and 38 countries, 55,600 strong, turned this temporary tent city  — which included a 60-acre field hospital — into the fourth largest city in Colorado. Toward the end of the Jamboree, another 25,000 were on site for Parents’ Day.

Scouts cooked their meals over charcoal fires and the Gazette Telegraph reported there were 16,000 campfires going at once. More than 1,278,000 meals were prepared during the event.

Among the celebrities who visited the site: James Arness, Marshal Matt Dillon of “Gunsmoke” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A special treat for the Scouts was a full-fledged rodeo by the local Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo crew.

Colorado Springs sale shoppers were in for a treat after the incredible tent city turned back into a ranch and acres of open land. In August 1960 Ross Auction had a super-duper auction of thousands and thousands of tents, benches, cooking utensils and much, much more.

The Jamboree was the second Scout event in our area. A year before, in 1959, thousands of Girls Scouts had been camped south of that area for the Senior Scout Roundup.

We’re guessing there are quite a number of people who remember the Jamboree and Roundup.
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My inquiry is about an attractive building that housed a display of stuffed animals housed in artistic and environmental settings. Probably in the 1980s(?) we would take our guests to visit. Do you know if they moved and where? I have a friend into taxidermy and would like to follow through on this display.
— Doris Becker

ANSWER: It was the Wildlife World Museum on a frontage road along the east side of Interstate 25 in Monument. It had been there for seven years when it closed down in 1988. Reasons cited included no direct access from the interstate, no directional highway signs were allowed and a tax-exempt status had been denied.

What many people remembered most about the site was the majestic Gerald Balciar bronze sculpture of an elk issuing his call toward the mountains. This big fellow was purchased by a builder who donated it and other sculptures to a sculpture garden in front of Westminster City Hall, reportedly as part of a swap involving a development.

Everything else in the exhibit was shipped to the Las Vegas Natural History Museum on the Las Vegas Strip.

We do have a new wildlife museum — this one interactive — within driving range: The Wildlife Experience in Parker, south of Denver. For information: 1-720-488-3300, http://www.thewildlifeexperience.org

Send questions to linda.navarro@gazette.com with “Column Question” in the subject line to avoid spam; mail to “Did You Ever Wonder?,” P.O. Box 1779, Colorado Springs 80901. Queries must be signed. No personal replies; because of limited space, not all questions will be answered.

Do you know anything about the partially built stone bridge along the Pikes Peak Greenway Trail?  It’s located next to the dirt bike park on the section of the trail that parallels Mark Dabling (Boulevard) and looks to be quite old. One end of the bridge runs directly into a hillside, the other end is demolished or was never completed.
— Chris

ANSWER: This was the Cascade Avenue bridge, which was destroyed in the 1935 Monument Creek flood. Cascade Avenue (Colorado Highway 1) had been the main route out of town to Monument and Denver. When more convenient roads and highways with fewer twists and turns were constructed, there was no need to repair this bridge.

What is the legal loophole that allows Colorado Springs Utilities to disrupt (ie, digging) private property without so much as a courtesy notification, much less permission?
— Kelli Whitney

ANSWER: “Typically, if we have to infringe on private property without notice, it’s an emergency situation like a main break or a damaged service line,” said utilities spokesman Steve Berry. “Even then, we try to communicate with the homeowner, but sometimes that’s not possible if they are not at home. If it’s an ongoing project, a planned project, where we’re going to be disrupting private property, we always try to notify the homeowner.”
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Send questions to linda.navarro@gazette.com with “Column Question” in the subject line to avoid spam; mail to “Did You Ever Wonder?,” P.O. Box 1779, Colorado Springs 80901. Queries must be signed. No personal replies; because of limited space, not all questions will be answered.

The street lights typically turn red and green on a regular, probably preset, schedule on almost all intersections in the city.  Hundreds of times I have observed pedestrians pushing the button on the light poles at intersections, hoping that the light will turn quicker for them. Except for school crossings between intersections, this almost invariably never happens. Are these buttons even connected to anything?
— H.L.

ANSWER: This brought a chuckle because we had just spotted a pedestrian hit a button 22 times trying to get it to change immediately. It didn’t.

City traffic engineers explained that a camera or a  traffic loop sensor in the pavement detects when there is traffic and controls the light sequence for traffic.

The push button controls the pedestrian signal and allows time for a pedestrian to cross the street.  They’re totally different devices inside the control cabinet.

And, no, hitting the button — no matter how many times — won’t instantly trigger the pedestrian-crossing light.  It’s all part of the total light sequencing for everyone at that intersection. Just picture what it would be like for traffic flow if the traffic lights changed instantly every time a pedestrian pushed the button.

New cameras on the market detect when there are pedestrians at an intersection, eliminating the pushing of buttons. We don’t yet have these locally.

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Downtown across from the library on Cascade there is a picket sign in front of GE Johnson Construction. My friend says it has been there for a long time. This company builds huge projects all over the area. What’s the deal?
– Jamie Lynn

Answer: The banner has been there probably 18 months and is NOT a picket line or picketing action. GE Johnson Construction Executive Vice President Dave Ivis said it is part of a several-year national campaign by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters “protesting that we have used a local drywall contractor, Spacecon.” However, Ivis pointed out, “there are no union local drywallers in Colorado Springs.”
Ivis said, “They don’t have a dispute with us (GE Johnson); they have a problem with us hiring Spacecon. But we have a bargaining agreement with the union. We can hire nonunion.”
Why not protest outside the Spacecon office instead? For one thing, it’s not on a main downtown thoroughfare.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: The people manning the union’s protest banner outside GE Johnson are apparently not union workers. They’re day laborers hired by the union. Yes, we asked them after they had walked back across Cascade Avenue after lunch at the soup kitchen.
You’ll see the banners in Denver and other cities nationwide where the Pennsylvania-based Spacecon has worked on projects. Complaints by Carpenters’ District Council of Kansas City & Vicinity against Spacecon include using nonunion workers, “misclassification of workers as independent contractors to avoid withholding taxes” and using undocumented workers.

As you drive North on I-25, just past the Sunbird restaurant in the valley to the north on the left side, is a stone, dome-looking structure. It’s quite large and appears like some sort of kiln. So my wife and I couldn’t stand it, and we went to investigate.  On the inside it looks more like a grain silo, about 10-12 feet deep now filled in with junk, and about 10-12 feet wide. Is this some sort of air vent for a mining operation, storage facility, kiln or drying oven?
— Andrew and Lisa

Answer:  There are several unusual structures in this area. One is a beehive/honeycomb coking oven where ore was cooked when the area was the Pikeview Mine complex from 1897 to 1957. It is one of the last surface remains from this area’s rich mining past. Coking coal was heated at an extremely high temperature and the coke/carbon remaining was pure enough to be used for smelting ore in the production of iron and steel.
Earlier, local resident Darrell Green shared family stories about having to save animals that had fallen into the oven hole. Green told us that his now-deceased father could ride his appaloosa horses across the 500 acres all the way to the Flying W Ranch property to the west. It’s an open expanse but one that requires caution. “There are numerous open mine shafts spread out over the bluffs,” Green said.

Peter Lobue says the particular structure you’re referring to is something quite different, an old cistern. “My dad, Michael Lobue, owned that property from 1924-1949, which was previously a brickyard that produced sandstone bricks. Our water supply was a pipeline from North Nevada Avenue, crossed Monument Creek, went under the highway and railroad tracks. During the heavy rain season, trees would flow down the creek and tear out the water line and sometimes in the winter the line would freeze, leaving us without water. We built a cistern out of bricks and kept it full of water for these emergencies. The dome you are referring to was a cistern.”

I’ve been wondering about this ever since the reconstruction of I-25 was supposedly totally completed through much of Colorado Springs. I sent an e-mail to the Colorado Department of Transportation about a year ago and never received an answer, and the situation still exists.
On the west side of the southbound I-25 bridge over Colorado Avenue are some big yellow barrels and some concrete barricades, both of which look temporary, but which have been in place ever since the reconstruction project. Why have the permanent bridge railings or other permanent fixtures never been completed and why have these temporary protective barriers remained?
— John Poyzer

Answer:  Bob Wilson, of CDOT, said this is the future off-ramp for the new Cimarron interchange. It was built during COSMIX and will remain until that part of the project is prioritized. This is part of the regional and statewide plan and must be reconstructed. Wilson said, “sometimes we will build an infrastructure for future projects so we don’t have to go back in and rebuild it later. This is more cost-effective.” For example, COSMIX built parts of the interstate to accommodate four lanes and there are just three right now.
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Send questions to linda.navarro@ gazette.com with “Column Question” in the subject line or mail to “Did You Ever Wonder?” P.O. Box 1779, Colorado Springs 80901. Queries must be signed. No personal replies or telephone calls.