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Mountain News: Mountain employees asked to expand language skills

ASPEN, Colo. — Employees of the Aspen Skiing Co. are being encouraged to pick up second languages, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, Chinese and Russian.
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ASPEN, Colo. — Employees of the Aspen Skiing Co. are being encouraged to pick up second languages, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, Chinese and Russian.

"If you're from Brazil, and you're dropping your kid off at ski school, you feel a lot better if someone there speaks Portuguese," says Jeff Hanle, spokesman for the Aspen Skiing Co. "As the international business has become more important for us, so has this."

Some employees are allowed to take time out from their normal work chores to study languages using Rosetta Stone language software provided by the company.

Each participating individual has a unique agreement based on the job, time at a computer and other considerations, says Hanle. A typical language-learning program would be six months or a year depending upon previous skill with that language. Employees, their supervisors and the administrator track progress and adjust as needed.

Rental and retail shop crews, ski patrollers and salaried ski instructors are eligible, as is the sales staff. The latter reports setting a goal of 15 to 30 minutes per day, seven days a week, to achieve their goals.

Kristi Kavanagh, the company's director of worldwide sales, said gaining skills in the native tongues of visitors from developing countries, including China, is particularly important. Those first-time tourists will likely return to their home countries and spread the word about their Aspen experience, so it had better be a good one.

"As that market begins to develop, we will look at potentially hiring people with those language skills to begin with, but developing China is in its infancy for us," she told the Daily News. The Chinese are visiting Aspen, if in still small numbers. In spending, however, they easily outpace Americans and Europeans.

Aspen's sales representative in Canada is learning French, the one for Latin American is learning Portuguese, and the one assigned to Eastern Europe is learning Russian.

"Sales people in particular are studying for growth markets," said Hanle. "If we see potential from a new market, be it Iceland, the Middle East, or Timbuktu, we would be open to that language."

How important is the international market to Aspen? It's big, and at one point the company said 20 per cent of its skier days came from outside the United States.

Hanle this time didn't share a statistic. "It is not that simple to put a specific number on this as more international guests book direct and online." But, he said, "without tipping our hand to our competitors, I can say that as global economies develop, and more of their citizens embrace travel and skiing, it will become more important," he told Mountain Town News.

"It is important to remain nimble and be able to stay in front of global economic and travel trends."

The newest frontier: 14-er bagging

ASPEN, Colo. — By now, thousands of people have climbed each and every one of the 14,000-foot (4,267 metres) peaks in Colorado. Some have climbed them all five, 10 and even 15 times over.

By conventional measurements, Colorado has 53 such mountains, although some lists reach a higher number by including subpeaks that are over 14,000 feet but separated by ridges that do not dip significantly.

With the novelty of climbing them all long ago diminished, adventurers in recent years have set out to climb them in very different ways. Some have set out for simple speed. Instead of years, as is common, some have run down the list and up the mountains in weeks, even days.

In the 1990s, Lou Dawson set out to ski all the 14ers. Later, Bart Miller used a bicycle to get from one peak to another, forsaking motorized vehicles entirely. And then Jon Kedrowski slept on top of all of them.

Now come Junaid Dawud and Luke DeMuth, 33 and 27 respectively, who decided to renounce even simple mechanization. To get from one peak to another, they have to walk. That simple exercise adds enormously to the challenge, as some of these peaks are scattered across hundreds of miles.

Walking those roads has been more difficult than the climbs, Dawud told The Aspen Times, and constitutes a "special kind of brutality" that "wears on you psychologically."

Dawud, who works at a restaurant in Boulder, Colo., had this gem of a piece of advice: "Place your passion as your priority; everything else will fall in line."

Yellowstone scorched areas came back quick

OLD FAITHFUL INN, Wyo. — For a time in 1988, it looked like the historic and much-venerated Old Faithful Inn in the heart of Yellowstone National Park would go up in smoke, as eventually was the case with trees in 36 per cent of the park.

Working through the old forests of lodgepole pine, the fire stubbornly nibbled and, pushed by strong winds of cold fronts, twice sprinted. Some Americans wondered about the "loss" of this national treasure and the incompetence of the National Park Service, which was supposed to protect it.

Even then, it was clear that the story wasn't all that simple. The evidence now continues to arrive, 25 years after the giant blaze, that fire has actually been good for Yellowstone.

Park officials tell the Jackson Hole News&Guide some areas in 1988 were believed to be too scorched and devoid of nutrients to allow for any regrowth for decades, if not for centuries. Instead, those that burned hottest have bounced back even more rapidly than other areas.

In one area of blow-down trees, the fire left nothing but ashes. "But it's coming back, so much so that you can't even tell today that the area looked like the bottom of your barbecue 25 years ago," said park ecologist Roy Rankin.

While trees aren't dense, they have grown prodigiously: some five to six metres tall.

"We really didn't know as much as we'd like to think we know about fire," he said.

Make no mistake: blackened stumps and other residue of the great fire remain, and so do patterns that, to the trained idea, reveal the path of that fire. The expectation is that these patterns of fire will remain evident to practiced eyes for probably centuries.

The fire was considered to be of a severity and scale that occur only once every 200 to 250 years.

Town seeks to expand carbon work

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, Colo. — The Telluride area continues to explore how to transition its energy sources to non-carbon sources. To that end, the town of Mountain Village, located half-way up the ski slopes of Telluride, has appropriated $30,000 for local residents to subscribe to panels in a solar farm 129 kilometres to the west in the Paradox Valley.

The grants are equal to 13 per cent of the purchase price of the solar energy collector panels. If the program is popular, town officials say, the town council might augment funds next year.

An array of solar panels is also being erected in Mountain Village at the terminus of the gondola that connects the town with its sibling, Telluride. Town officials admit the array will produce just a negligible amount of electricity, but is considered important in that it shows the town leading by example.

The purpose is to reduce the town's responsibility for emissions of greenhouse gases. So far, those efforts have been mostly restricted to town operations. Mayor Dan Jansen said the effort must now expand to the private sector, which is responsible for 95 per cent of emissions.

"We pledged to reduce our footprint 20 per cent by 2020, and we're on track to hit that. But to really move the needle in Mountain Village, we need full participation from the community," he tells The Telluride Watch. "We're trying to use carrots, not sticks."

But voters in Mountain Village, Telluride and the broader San Miguel County will be asked to approve a stick, a one per cent tax on utilities. The revenues, an estimated $150,000 in 2014, would be used to improve building performance and other greenhouse gas reduction efforts.

County Commissioner Art Goodtimes, although a member of the Green Party, tells the Telluride Daily Planet that he favours the provision but is unsure of the timing. Many people in the ranching communities around Norwood that comprise his district still aren't flush.

Banff also leading by example in solar array

BANFF, Alberta — Banff town officials are also undertaking erection of solar panels on the town hall in an effort to provide an example to the community. Chad Townsend, the town's environmental coordinator, tells the Rocky Mountain Outlook that the installation will be "by far the largest (array) in the Bow Valley." Typically, such installations pay for themselves in 10 years, not considering the environmental benefits, he said.

Officials take new look at rickshaw

BANFF, Alberta — Banff town officials are reviewing their previous ban on rickshaws and pedi-cabs. The council in 2007 had ordered the ban because of how much they were slowing and disrupting traffic. But the town agreed to review the ban at the request of an operator, James Barkley of Rocky Mountain Pedicabs, who has been working in the shopping and entertainment district of Calgary since 2005.

Barkley told the Rocky Mountain Outlook that traffic congestion was not an issue during the trial. Banff Mayor Karen Sorenson was more reserved in her enthusiasm, but did admit to the goal of enhancing the "sense of animation and vibrancy in Banff."