Got this story from The Daily Planet – thought it was too good to pass up. BTW, it’s best if you know that the Bridal Veil Power Plant is ON TOP OF A MOUNTAIN with a tiny dirt road leading to it. It’s the white building next to the falls in the picture below.
Telluride, Colo. -
Somewhere along the way, Noah Grubb’s plan (if he had one) went awry.
It was apparently going so well. Tuesday evening, he stole a Subaru from Town Park and got away clean. He rolled out of the parking lot, hit the county highway, and put the town in his rearview mirror. Then his getaway hit a couple of speed bumps.
Because he headed east.
The highway west is the only way out of town. Black Bear Pass is one-way, and closed.
And so Grubb — a Steamboat Springs resident in his early 30s, in town for Bluegrass and staying a few extra days, his whereabouts unknown to his friend and his girlfriend — rolled to a stop at the Bridal Veil power plant, perhaps exhausted, and fell asleep.
But before he landed softly in jail, his ride had a wild end, one detailed in interviews with police and witnesses.
First of all, Grubb panicked John Pattison Kane. Kane, from Paonia, was in town to work the Bluegrass festival, and was packing in the equipment Tuesday. He left his keys near the emergency brake of his unlocked 1993 green Subaru Legacy wagon and slept at a friend’s house, and came back in the morning to find the car stolen.
He took the day off work to look for it. “I thought the guy’d be halfway across Nevada,” he said. His friend Dustin Bradshaw tried to cheer him up: “You know what this reminds me of? ‘Big Lebowski’ Maybe there’ll be some homework left in there. ‘Is this your homework, Larry? Is this your homework?’”
Kane laughed.
And Grubb annoyed — and scared — Eric Jacobson, who owns the Bridal Veil power plant. Wednesday was moving day for Jacobson; his family spends the winters elsewhere. With his 6-year-old daughter and boxes full of stuff, he showed up to the house, miffed that a car was blocking his driveway. He worked for a few hours, trudging his way around the Subaru, then decided to tow it with his tractor. He called the Sheriff’s Office for permission.
“It’s not a green Subaru, is it?” asked Commander Eric Berg. It was. “Don’t touch it,” Berg said. “It’s stolen. I’ll be right up.”
When Berg arrived, Jacobson assured him the thief was nowhere to be found, but Berg asked him to make sure. So Jacobson casually checked all the room in his house, finding nothing, until he stepped into an upstairs bedroom and found a red shock of hair sticking out from under the covers.
Jacobson hustled out and yelled for the deputy. Berg grabbed his taser and handcuffs and rushed in. He pointed his gun at the sleeping man. (He had reason to think Grubb had a gun.) Grubb didn’t move. When Grubb remained comatose, with cops from every jurisdiction a long way away, Berg put his taser on Grubb’s chest, threatened to zap him, and finally got the handcuffs on him.
Grubb is being held on $25,000 bond. He will be charged with stealing a car, trespassing, criminal mischief and criminal tampering.
Apparently, since the Jacobson family wasn’t home that night, Grubb sauntered in and made himself at home. He made his way down to the power generator and hit the emergency stop button. It ground the generator to halt. He climbed, muddy, into the hot tub. And, like a deadhead Goldilocks, he tried out all the beds in the house and “took the most humongous crap you could even imagine in one of them,” Jacobson said. “It was like half a bushel.” Then he settled into the bed upstairs and waited to be found.
That afternoon, cops called Kane to tell him they’d found his car, unharmed.
“At least everything’s been returned,” Kane said, relieved. “At least he didn’t drive it off Bridal Veil. It would have been a little green ball of Subaru-ness.”
It’s not clear where or when Grubb’s time at the Bluegrass Festival went off the rails. Was it hanging around a few extra days, worrying his friend and girlfriend back in Steamboat Springs?
Was it when tied a sarong onto Kane’s tent, left behind a Frisbee golf set, a camping chair and some deadhead stickers? And sat on the ground and quietly ate earthworms, as one witness told Kane?
One thing’s for sure: by the time he was heading toward the east valley house of David Swanson, where he stopped to mumble “weird questions that didn’t make any sense,” Swanson said, such as, “Where can I get some of these?”, Grubb’s visit to Telluride had skipped off the rails, jumped the track, and was barreling its way toward Bridal Veil, to that very comfortable bed and those very uncomfortable cuffs.
