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Mountain News: Backcountry huts part of McNamara’s legacy

ASPEN, Colo. - Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, will forever be remembered as the architect of a war gone terribly wrong.

ASPEN, Colo. - Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, will forever be remembered as the architect of a war gone terribly wrong. But McNamara, who died Monday at the age of 93, should also be remembered for his abiding passion for the mountains.

That passion, acquired as a youngster growing up in California's Bay Area and backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, was more fully revealed in the 1980s with his part in the creation of the 10 th Mountain Division huts between Aspen and Vail.

McNamara provided significant funding for the first hut, McNamara, and for the second hut, Margy's. The latter hut was named after his first wife, Margaret, who had died of cancer in 1981.

With the Spartan but adequate comforts of those two huts, backcountry skiers could traverse the first segment of the trip to Camp Hale, where the 10 th Mountain Division soldiers had trained during World War II. Within a decade, in 1992, it was possible to ski between Vail and Aspen on well-marked trails without spending the night out.

The hut association takes reservations for 31 huts in the area from Crested Butte to Breckenridge. Of those huts, it owns 13, connected by 350 miles of well-marked trails.

Elizabeth Boyles, the first director for the hut association, says that both Robert and Margaret McNamara had polio when they were young. The affliction limited the weight-bearing ability of Margaret. Although she had died before the huts were built, said Boyles, Robert was motivated by the desire to help others enjoy the backcountry without the encumbrance of heavy gear.

Ben Eiseman, a Denver surgeon and one of McNamara's many outdoors raconteurs, persuaded McNamara to provide the crucial seed money for the huts. But neither had expected a leery forest supervisor.

The forest supervisor had seen many junky cabins during his most recent posting in Alaska. He feared more of the same. McNamara was persistent. "Look, I'll make you a deal," he said. "If after a year you don't like them, I'll pay to take them out. And second, we'll work toward establishing an endowment to pay for them."

"That's what got them started," says Peter Looram, a former director of the 10 th Mountain Division Hut Association. "He was a very persuasive person."

Lack of use has never been a problem, even if creature comforts are modest. None have indoor plumbing, and water is created by melting snow. The earliest huts had no lights, although all now have photovoltaic collectors.

"He really felt strongly about the hut system," said Boyles. "He felt the huts opened up the opportunity to enjoy the wilderness to others who might not otherwise be able to do so. He just felt that time spent in the mountains was so important to the human soul."

McNamara, a Harvard Business School whiz kid, had studied statistical techniques to achieve efficiency, a discipline he methodically applied to bombing runs in China during World War II. After the war, he helped turn around Ford Motor Co., becoming president shortly before he was tapped as secretary of defense by President John Kennedy in 1961.

In his 1995 memoir, McNamara admitted that fear of spreading communism, called the domino theory, had been a faulty reason for U.S. involvement in what was essentially a civil war in Vietnam. More than 58,000 Americans died in the war. His own misguided optimism had been replaced with skepticism before he resigned in 1968 to become president of the World Bank.

McNamara had been a frequent Aspen visitor even before he and Margaret purchased the first home built in Snowmass Village after the Snowmass ski area opened in 1968.

Even in his later years, he remained vigorous, skiing to the backcountry huts and even in his latter 70s skiing up 13,200-foot Homestake Peak, located above the 10 th Mountain Division Hut.

"The mountains just really invigorated him," says Boyles. "He was known for putting in 18-hour days, even when he was on vacation."

Sun Valley drops pass prices

KETCHUM, Idaho - Sun Valley Resort has lowered its prices for ski passes. "This is the first time the price of a season pass has come down in the 30-or-so years I've worked here," said Jack Sibbach, a spokesman for the Sun Valley Resort.

The new Sun Plus Pass can be had for $1,500 if purchased in July. Last year, the same pass cost $2,050. A packet for 20 days also has been reduced in price, to $750.

None of this compares with the deals being offered in Colorado by Vail Resorts and Intrawest. Vail, for example, has the Epic Pass, introduced last year, which offers unlimited access to Vail and four other Colorado ski resorts plus California's Heavenly, all for $600. Intrawest's $500 pass offers a pass both to Copper Mountain and Winter Park.

"If we were located next to Vail, we might have to take a different strategy," Sun Valley's Sibbach said. "But we're not in that market, competing with the Front Range resorts."

Life after the gilded age

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Across the ski towns, commentators are trying to make sense of the craters that used to be the vibrant real estate economy. The lesson, at least in Telluride, says Seth Cagin, publisher of The Telluride Watch, is that the community, for various reasons, became over-invested in real estate.

Cagin for years had argued that Telluride was getting it wrong. Almost militantly anti-growth policies stymied the growth of a tourism economy, he had said. This was OK as long as people were willing to bid up prices ever more for real estate. Now that, too, has ended.

"Despite our best intentions to build a sustainable community, we built instead a community for the gilded age, with gargantuan private homes and far too few tourist accommodations to support a vibrant economy with a middle class," he writes.

"This might have worked indefinitely if the bubble had lasted indefinitely. But the gilded age has come to a crashing close, as we all knew it had to, and the question for Telluride and Mountain Village now and for the next decade is where do we go from here."

For Cagin the bottom line message is the same one he has preached for several years. "We may not get obscenely rich being the tourist town we were always meant to be, and certainly not as rich as we did when the houses we bought one year were worth twice as much just a few years later. But we can have a sustainable community."

Sell low

ASPEN, Colo. - Real estate sales in Aspen and Pitkin County continued to drag through May, with a 44 per cent decline in volume for the year as compared to the corresponding period last year. Real estate agent Craig Morris tells the Aspen Times that those sellers who cling to prices reached during the height of the boom in late 2007 and early 2008 have not been moving. Those properties that have been reduced in price by 20 to 40 per cent are selling, he said.

An amazing runoff in Colorado

EAGLE, Colo. - The Eagle River was running bank to bank on Saturday night as fireworks glittered, sparkled and boomed in the town of Eagle, located 30 miles down-valley from Vail. The fireworks were good, said seasoned observers, but no more than customary.

The runoff of the river, however, was another matter. Willy Powell, the town manager, whose house overlooks the river, said he could not remember a runoff that high and sustained in the last 30 years. The high runoff began about the third week of May and never has substantially receded since then.

Most often rivers peak with runoff in early June, sometimes earlier, and in big snow years later. This year, river-watchers expected an early runoff because of the storms that had deposited dust from the deserts of the Southwest onto the high-mountain snowpacks during winter and early spring.

In places, the snow looked pink from dozens of miles away. While snow reflects solar radiation, darker surfaces absorb it. As such, the runoff was expected to arrive early, leaving rivers running low by now. Everybody from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times wrote about it.

Seeing an early runoff, foresters were warning that this could become a huge fire year in Colorado, even worse than the record drought of 2002.

But then something queer happened - it started raining, and it really hasn't stopped since. In Breckenridge, weather watcher Rick Bly recorded 22 days of rainy weather during June, compared to an average of eight. In addition to nearly twice as much moisture as average, it was about 5 degrees cooler.

Clearly, having more rain and cooler weather results in more water in the creeks. But ranchers tell the Summit Daily News that something else is going on. With about 95 per cent of lodgepole pine now dead because of the beetle epidemic, the trees are not using as much water.

Grady Culbreath, a rancher near Kremmling, said streams that normally dry up during summer have been running into autumn.

This is likely to be only temporary, however. The newspaper notes that with the needles from the dead trees now dropping off, that allows sunlight to reach the ground. This, in turn, is resulting in aspen trees, lodgepole saplings, and grasses growing on the forest floor.

Grandkids for lynx immigrants

CREEDE, Colo. - When Colorado wildlife biologists released the first transplanted Canada lynx into the San Juan Mountains in April, 1999, there were many questions. The single most important question was whether the lynx would find enough to eat.

The answer to that question at this point seems to be yes. Lynx trapped during winter have all been well fed.

But the more compelling testimony to a healthy diet is whether the lynx have interest in sex. And again, at least for now, the evidence is that yes - lynx are finding enough food to eat that they have spare time and energy to procreate.

This year, for the first time, lynx kittens were discovered that had been born to pairs of lynx that were themselves native to Colorado. In other words, these kittens are the grandchildren of immigrants.

All along, wildlife biologists had said this would be a milestone if it were achieved.

Altogether, the search for lynx kittens this year by Colorado Division of Wildlife researchers found 10 lynx, most in the San Juan Mountains, but others to the north in Gunnison County and yet another in Eagle County, which is spliced by I-70 in the northern part of the state.

"We are very close to achieving all of our goals for the lynx reintroduction," said Rick Kahn, the state's lead biologist. "We have had successful breeding, and we have had Colorado-born lynx reproduce."

But wildlife biologists still aren't willing to predict a sustaining population. "There could be some weird disease that really knocks them out," said Joe Lewandowski, a division spokesman. "I don't think anyone in the division is going to say this is an unqualified success."

Although the reintroduction program has been underway for 10 years now, he said, "in terms of study of wildlife, that's just a blip on the screen."

So far, 218 lynx have been reintroduced into Colorado, with 126 lynx kittens known to have been born in Colorado.

Fly fishing focus of film fest

KETCHUM, Idaho - Although film festivals have become common, Ketchum several years ago bagged one with a narrow theme: fly fishing. This year's festival featured segments of such movies as Rivers of the Lost Coast, a history of the fly fishing community on California's pristine northern coast, and BASS: the Movie , which follows the movements of the large-mouth bass.