Updates

Our team completed spring maintenance and installed some new equipment at our Elephant Mountain tower site on June 8. Our Elephant Mountain site is located along the Highway 133 corridor and provides wireless broadband, television, FM Radio and Public Safety Radio service.

The site is accessible only via helicopter. It was a beautiful day to fly! We started by flying down empty propane tanks that supply our generator at the site, and flying new ones up to the site. We then focused on site maintenance including checking connections on our antennas, upgrading software on the equipment on site, changing air filters, testing the generator and installing a new room monitoring system.

Our partners at Visionary Broadband also installed two new broadband panels on the tower to load-balance and better-serve customers throughout the Highway 133 corridor.

6/2/2022: Telecommunications staff are planning repairs at the Elephant tower June 8-10, 2022. This will mean intermittent outages of TV, FM and Broadband in the Crystal River Valley. Please be patience as staff work as quickly as possible. Questions can be answered at translator@pitkincounty.com 

Staff took a look at the Sunlight tower today. Repairs were made after the latest round of wind and snow.

5/29/22 7:30 AM: Power has been restored to Sunlight, Ruedi and Thomasville sites and services are back on the air. Much thanks to our partners at Holy Cross Energy for their quick work!

5/28/22 2:45 PM: Multiple power outages are disrupting TV, FM and Broadband services from Sunlight, Ruedi, Thomasville tower sites.

Ruedi and Thomasville: Power was shut off by Holy Cross to many areas up the Frying Pan Valley for a fire near Ruedi Shores, and to safely allow chainsaw work by Roaring Fork Fire Rescue personnel. TV, FM and Broadband will be unavailable until power is restored.

Sunlight: High winds have disrupted power to our Sunlight tower site. Sunlight is the source for many Television and FM radio stations throughout the valley. These services will be intermittent until Holy Cross restores power to the site.

The winds have returned and have blown a tree on a powerline supplying our Sunlight tower. Luckily Holy Cross was able to restore power fairly quickly. Thomasville and Ruedi are also having power outages. This is leaving TV and FM unbroadcastable at the moment. Future problems may occur with more winds predicted to blow a storm system into the area tonight through the weekend. Electric crews are working to fix the problems.

Over the weekend Telecommunications got calls from our TV viewers that the channels were not working. Monday morning a couple of staff members went up to our Crown Mtn tower and the winds had blown the huge microwave dishes ajar. Staff climbed the tower and adjusted the dishes in the ongoing wind. They also traveled to the Williams tower and yesterday made it up to the Sunlight tower which still has 4 feet of snow around the tower and a good ways down the primitive road getting up there. The Sunlight tower visit was exceptional because staff had been monitoring the wind before they went up there and The National Weather Service had clocked a 186 mph gust up there! That is a category 4 Hurricane strength wind! Unfortunately the wind didn’t calm down much after they got up there and they were climbing the tower with 50mph gusts. They managed to get the work done but today they were feeling a bit frazzled. Continued monitoring and trips are planned for the coming days.

Due to high winds day after day in the area the microwave dishes and antennas on the Pitkin County towers have been blown ajar and need to be adjusted back into place. Staff are in the field trying to correct problems at Crown, Williams and Sunlight towers. These fixes may only last as long as the next big blast of wind. The staff will continue to stay after it but there may be TV or Radio outages until the winds calm down.