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Mountain News: Aspen prices reflect ‘qualitative experience’

ASPEN, Colo. – With Vail Resorts ratcheting down its five-mountain ski pass to $579 for this year, there was some curiosity about whether Aspen Skiing Co. would lower the season pass price for its four ski hills. Not so.

ASPEN, Colo. – With Vail Resorts ratcheting down its five-mountain ski pass to $579 for this year, there was some curiosity about whether Aspen Skiing Co. would lower the season pass price for its four ski hills.

Not so. Instead, Aspen increased the price, and will ask $1,299 for its top-of-the-line pass. The company’s spin is that Aspen is worth more than Vail.

“It’s a different experience,” company spokesman Jeff Hanle told The Aspen Times. “That’s what it boils down to. They’re going for a quantitative experience. We’re going for a qualitative experience.”

Individual day prices — sometimes called the marquee figure — have not been set. Last year, Vail and Beaver Creek set the nation’s benchmark with $92. It was $87 at Aspen and Snowmass, with Deer Valley in the same area of nosebleed.

 

It’s the perpendicular pull

EDINBURGH, Scotland – It’s the sort of stuff that only a snow nerd could care about. But then, mountain towns are full of snow nerds.

The issue is how slab avalanches are precipitated. The conventional thinking has been that gravity mattered a great deal. In other words, the angle of the slope was all important.

But in a report published in Science Magazine in July, a team of researchers say that the initial crack in the snow depends more on the perpendicular pull.

“This research is really an entirely new paradigm for how the fractures that result in snow avalanches work,” said Karl Birkeland of Montana State University. The study was summarized in Science News.

 

Vail Resorts acquitted

BEAVER CREEK, Colo. – A jury has found Vail Resorts innocent of a claim that it was negligent in the hiring of a ski instructor. The ski instructor had sex with a 17-year-old girl whom he had been teaching.

The instructor had been previously accused by local prosecutors of raping the girl at his condominium in Beaver Creek in 2006. However, jurors last winter acquitted him of that charge, although finding him guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, notes the Vail Daily.

In a civil case, the girl and her mother sued the company, saying that Vail Resorts should have known better than to hire him. The company had employed him for 17 years, and could find no evidence of doing a background check on him until 2004, less than two years before the sexual act occurred. That check only found two charges of driving while under the influence. However, in fact, he had a much longer string of brushes with the law, including several other arrests for DUI.

However, a jury in Denver concluded from the evidence presented at the trial that the ski company was not negligent for employing him.

 

Condi Rice plays Brahms

ASPEN, Colo. – Condoleeza Rice spent Saturday in Aspen, tickling the ivories and defending the Bush administration policies.

Rice had performed in Aspen before. She was 17 then and living in Denver, and was a student at the Aspen Music School. After listening to 11 and 12-year-olds play music from sight that she had spent all year learning, she decided she was more likely to be asked to play piano at Nordstrom’s than Carnegie Hall.

Instead of music in college, she took an international relations class at the University of Denver that was being taught by Joseph Korbel. Korbel, the father of Madeline Albright, the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, oversaw her studies through her Ph.D.

The Aspen Times says that Rice did a credible job of performing Dvorak and Brahms.

Afterward, while being interviewed by Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, Rice defended the decision-making process leading to the Iraq War. She said the notion that the Bush administration just wanted to go to war is something that gets under her skin.

However, she acknowledged that the Bush administration hadn’t realized beforehand “how incredibly broken Iraq was” and how hard it would be to rebuild the country.

 

Still seeking critical mass

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, Colo. – Several years ago a short film titled “The Lost People of Mountain Village” was created. It instantly became a cult classic in ski towns.

The protagonists in this film are Indiana Jones-type archaeologists, coursing through the empty plazas of Mountain Village during the off-season, wondering loudly about what could have happened to this vanished civilization that was responsible for these edifices.

But, in a way, Mountain Village is like a lot of ski towns, and especially their slope-side cousins. It is to Telluride what Snowmass Village is to Aspen, and what Mt. Crested Butte is to Crested Butte.

Mountain Village gets real quiet during the shoulder seasons, but the pace notably slackens anytime when the ski lifts aren’t operating.

Ski resort planner Paul Mathews more or less has confirmed local sensibilities about what to do. He and his company, Whistler-based Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners, were retained by Mountain Village to study the dynamics. The town, he has concluded, needs more “hot beds,” i.e. those that can be rented to tourists, and it needs more diverse recreation activities.

Without those draws, there isn’t enough business for other businesses, he said. “There are more empty spaces than full spaces right now. It makes you sort of wonder what may have gone wrong.”

But nothing has gone wrong, he said. Only 60 per cent of the accommodations planned for Mountain Village have been built, and they need to be constructed to achieve that critical threshold. Then, it’s also a matter of building a year-round economy, having enough affordable housing to keep operations going and…

Well, if you know anything about ski towns, you know the drill here. Of course, Hal Clifford in his book “Downhill Slide” argued that such master-planned communities are doomed for failure.

 

Mammoth finally gets flights

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. – Mammoth finally has the air service it has been craving. Horizon Air has announced that the daily flights from Los Angeles will begin in December. Horizon will use the Q400 regional jet that has become so popular for ski town flights, because of its improved gas mileage. The flight will take 65 minutes, which compares to five hours or more by highway from Los Angeles. Mammoth boosters hope that a similar flight to San Francisco may be possible next year.

Meanwhile, Kent Myers was in Mammoth recently to instruct the locals in how to go about building air service. Myers directed marketing operations at Copper Mountain and Winter Park during the 1970s and early 1980s. Then he assembled direct flight programs on behalf of the Steamboat and Vail/Beaver Creek. Since the late 1990s, he has had his own business, Airplanners. With that business, he has established 34 new air routes to seven different mountain airports.

Myers told a crowd in Mammoth recently that air programs have low risk with a big “wow.” And air links help not only deliver tourists, but also improve quality of life for the locals. A program along the lines of what he is proposing can also change business models by making Mammoth more attractive to a wider range of entrepreneurs and other professionals. Of course, airlines will need guaranteed money to cover their costs, and to ensure that happens, the community must belly up, he said.

Another expatriate from the Vail marketing department, Rob Perlman, also went to Mammoth in the 1990s to assemble an air program. While Mammoth did have flights for a few years by United Express, the program didn’t hold together. Perlman then became director of Colorado Ski Country USA.

Ski Country deflated recently with the departure of Vail Resorts and its considerable dues, and as it did, Perlman took off to join Intrawest with that company’s Steamboat operation.

 

Parks need a few Ritz-Carlton hotels

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. – You know what’s wrong with Yosemite and a lot of other national parks? They don’t have enough five-star rated hotel rooms.

So says The Economist magazine from its perch overseeing world affairs in London. The magazine notes that visitation to Yosemite during the last 13 years has dropped 9 per cent. This is despite population growth of 17 per cent in California, much of it inland, closer to the Sierra Nevada, where Yosemite and other parks are located.

Such proximity is a theme across the West, where population growth is occurring most rapidly near national parks and forests.

“Americans plainly think it is a good idea to live near national parks, but they are not keen on visiting them,” says the Economist.

What’s going on? The magazine examines a variety of factors. Big-game hunting has also slackened. Cities, which people may have been fleeing in the 1990s, have become safer. And shopping malls are now outdoor oriented, instead of domed.

“Yosemite is long on staggering views but short on what most people would today regard as entertainment,” says The Economist. It also notes that the hotels of Yosemite, although pretty, are basic. “If they were in Las Vegas, they would have been dynamited long ago.”

Top-end hotel rooms at parks get booked far more rapidly than cabins, notes The Economist, and cabins with indoor plumbing are reserved before more rustic accommodations. The magazine thinks the conclusion is obvious. And the fault, it says, lies with conservationists opposed to upscaling.

“This is a shame, and a self-defeating exercise,” concludes the magazine. “America’s environmental movement emerged in the 19 th century to push for national parks. In the 20 th century it sold them to the public through photographs and writing. It now seems bent on driving people away from them.”

 

Developers struggling

MINTURN, Colo. –The Ginn Co., the developer of a giant resort real estate project near Vail, also has projects in the southeastern United States, including one in North Carolina called Laurelmor that is struggling to survive.

The project, reports the Vail Daily, has missed an interest and principal payment of $675 million. The company is trying to restructure the loan. Slowed sales were blamed.

Ginn is planning to build a giant new real estate development of about 1,300 units, a small ski area, a gondola, and a golf course on one-time mining properties in the triangle of Minturn, Red Cliff and Vail.

Representatives of Ginn told the Daily that the projects are separately financed and legally separate.

The Ginn project has been annexed into the town of Minturn, but must get a further approval next year. As well, a fundamental problem involving water supply has yet to be resolved.

Meanwhile, some 40 miles to the west, another project considered cutting edge is off the burner. Aspen-based Kurt and John Forstmann had proposed a resort ranch project in the Gypsum Creek Valley. The theme of sustainability was to have been featured at the 340-home project, with solar collectors on homes and even a communal agriculture area for local production of food,

A Gypsum town official told the Eagle Valley Enterprise that the Forstmanns said timing was a problem, including doubts about market conditions.

 

Urban and rural meet

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – Downtown Steamboat Springs is getting an extreme makeover. Redevelopment of recent years is yielding a new mosaic of buildings more urban in nature, with restaurants and other commercial uses on the ground-floor levels and then city-style condominiums in the upper floors reminiscent of some of the new development in Aspen.

Jim Cook, a developer in Steamboat formerly from Chicago, tells the Steamboat Pilot & Today that the theme is “dine-in, dine-out” living.

But if this mixed-use development is sweeping the country, the mix in mountain towns like Steamboat, with its Stetson hats, is more tricky. The newspaper’s Tom Ross describes the theme as “somewhere between the banks of Butcherknife Creek and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”

Prices for these new digs range from $650,000 to $2 million. The most contemporary of the new projects is one called Alpenglow. It replaces the Nite’s Rest Motel. The design of the new condos is called “Western transitional,” and the Pilot likes it. It is, says the newspaper, “brilliant blend of urban and mountain style.”

 

Town considers biomass

OAK CREEK, Colo. – Investigation is underway into the possibility of creating a central heating system in Oak Creek, a small town about 20 miles south of Steamboat. The specific proposal calls for burning wood from the dead and dying forests in northwest Colorado to create electricity.

The town, created because of its coal deposits, is in the midst of an ironic transition. The local schools are replacing their coal boilers with a biomass boiler. That boiler is supplemented by a geoexchange heating system.

Townspeople and businesses, however, are on individual heating systems that use propane. The price of propane has increased from about $1 per gallon during the 1990s to $2.60 per gallon by the end last winter.

Enter Mark Mathis, who last year constructed a plant in Kremmling, a former logging town about 50 miles away, that takes dead trees and grinds them up into pellets. His company, Comfluent Energy, shipped its first load in January.

The Steamboat Pilot & Today explains that Mathis is now trying to persuade Oak Creek to convert to biomass for both heating and electrical production. His bottom-line argument is cost. Mathis estimated Oak Creek spends at least $2 million a year on propane to heat its homes and businesses. He claims that cost can be reduced to $500,000 by burning biomass pellets in a central burner.

The new infrastructure will cost a pretty penny. He estimates $1.2 to $41.5 million for the central burner, and then $5 million for pipes to distribute the heat via hot water to individual homes and businesses.

There may be additional savings, he says, if carbon emissions are monetized, resulting in payments for efforts that result in reduced emission from forest fires.

Mathis estimates payback on investment at four years.

If Oak Creek were to do so, it would become the first town in the United States to go to biomass 100 per cent.

Elsewhere in the world, full-blown biomass heating is not rare. A delegation from Vail visited Austrian facilities several years ago to study what might be in Colorado. Nothing concrete, however, has come of it.

Biomass burners, however, are not infrequent in the United States. A biomass burner is used to heat a greenhouse in nearby Walden, a place of long, long winters. California’s Sierra Nevada also uses biomass to generate electricity, and is studying the feasibility of more expanded use.

One key issue still facing this fledgling biomass industry in Colorado, but also other states, is the long-term supply. While Colorado currently has huge amounts of dead trees, the Forest Service so far has offered no assurances of long-term availability of supply.

 

Ski Idlewild retreats further

WINTER PARK, Colo. – The old base cafeteria at Ski Idlewild is no more. The building was torched by firefighters in Winter Park as part of efforts to groom the old ski area for real estate development.

The ski area opened in 1961. By that point, Winter Park had been operating as a ski area for more than 20 years. Even then, however, there was virtually no comparison. Idlewild had only 400 feet of vertical. But for somebody wanting to learn to ski or to get instruction in the more arcane skill of telemarking, as was the case with this scribe in 1986, Idlewild’s slopes had just the right tilt of forgiveness.

The ski area closed after a lift accident in 1986, and then continued on with cross-country ski and other operations until as recently as 2002.

The Middle Park Times says that the 22-acre property has zoning for up to 317 units plus a 70-room lodge.

 

Water on centre stage

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – Water in various perturbations has been on centre stage in Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, the town at the base of the ski area. The story in both cases is what will be best for the resort economy.

At the foot of the ski area, plans are afoot for two different reservoirs. More snowmaking is planned for the ski area, and that does not include the possible expansion onto Snodgrass Mountain, which would require more snowmaking yet. As well, real estate development is underway, which has its own needs.

Meanwhile, Crested Butte — the old mining town that is two miles away — continues to nip at the heels of a proposed molybdenum mine at the headwaters of Coal Creek. That creek bifurcates the town and also provides the town’s drinking water.

Opponents of the mine wanted the Forest Service to study the validity of the 300 patented mining claims and the 5,000 acres of unpatented claims, but the Forest Service ruled that it wouldn’t be a good use of resources at this time.

 

Truckee hopes to exceed state

TRUCKEE, Calif. – Truckee town officials are looking at advancing regulations that minimize energy use in buildings and encourage use of alternative energy. California’s state assembly is requiring policies that by 2020 reduce the level of greenhouse gas emission to those of 1990, despite the increased population growth and general increase of energy use in recent years. Truckee’s planning department hopes to exceed the state requirement, reports the Sierra Sun.

 

More talk about diversify the economy

KETCHUM, Idaho – The desire to diversify the local economies is a theme in the ski-based mountain towns of the West. There have been discussions about this in Telluride, Vail, and Jackson Hole in recent years, and probably many other locales. That’s also why a group called Sustain Blaine, which is rooted in the Sun Valley and Ketchum areas, has hired a company from Texas to help generate ideas about how to diversify the economy, expand the area’s tax base, and develop and retain talent, reports the Idaho Mountain Express.