Next week, the list for our annual Best of the Valley competition should be nestled in your newspaper. For some years, the Record has conducted a reader poll on favorite businesses, services and public officials in the Valley. It’s one of the more popular contests we do annually, with reason.

We’re polling residents for their picks in nearly 60 categories in the contest, which is both an annual bragging-rights showdown among local business, and a snapshot of our community and its movers and shakers. It’s about more than business: It’s a way to gauge buzz for the best non-profit, the best Valley event, the best volunteer, firefighter, national treasure, police officer and city employee. Public servants and business people with a lot of friends, family and local connections typically get a good showing, but newcomers and dark horses can often shine.

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A young man in a black, hooded jacket boards the bus by the credit union, takes his seat, and slips on headphones. On an iPod, he clicks on some of his favorite Ozzy Osbourne songs. But the rock can wait as he tells his story.

Garth is in his early 20s, and the Snoqualmie Valley Transportation bus is his link between Transitional Learning Classes at Mount Si and home in North Bend. For a buck, he’s got a lift that’s safer than a walk in the rain or hitchhiking across town.

Garth got grief on the school bus. Riding the SVT for more than two years, he’s never looked back.

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Driving from Snoqualmie to North Bend a few weeks ago to see a show about a certain Hobbit, I had to slow down on Elk Tourism Row. That’s not an official title for State Route 202, but it’s a good descriptor for what happens when a two-lane highway must also accommodate parked cars on both lanes.

Dozens of folks—it’s impossible that they were all out-of-towners—had jumped out of their cars to witness a major conclave of elk on Meadowbrook Farm. Momentarily inconvenienced, my reactions jumped from impatience at the traffic jam to wonder at the sight. Why get upset? I thought. The elk were in the field, doing their thing. So were the camera-packing travelers.

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On our website this week are two articles that don’t seem related. Yet they are.

First, we meet Tia Borgioli, whose family has lived in Snoqualmie for two years, and who happens to be, through circumstance as well as by design and effort, deeply connected to her neighbors.

So connected, in fact, that she put herself in harm’s way to protect, not just her family, but her tightly-knit neighborhood. Tia did something that I think many others might not have the guts to do—confront two burglary suspects, demand to know their business, and then promptly call the cops. She braved a gun to the head in her effort to stop the threat of crime in her neighborhood.

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