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Mountain News: Transceivers carried on patrolled slopes

TELLURIDE, Colo. – December was extraordinary in that three people died of avalanches on open ski trails within ski areas.

TELLURIDE, Colo. – December was extraordinary in that three people died of avalanches on open ski trails within ski areas. It was the most in-bound deaths in one season since three skiers were killed in a single avalanche at Alpine Meadows, a California ski area, in 1976.

The result of these avalanche deaths, report both the Denver Post and New York Times , has produced a curious trend. People at both Telluride and Wyoming’s Jackson Hole Mountain Resort have been carrying avalanche transceivers for use on patrolled slopes. While transceivers, which are also called beacons, are common among backcountry skiers, the perception has been that in-bound slopes are without avalanche risk.

But if in-bound avalanches are exceeding rare, they have occurred. “We’re doing what we normally do,” said Bob Comey, director of the Bridger-Teton National Forest Avalanche Center. “Our techniques work really well, but they’re not ever 100 percent guaranteed.”

Paul Baugher, director of the Northwest Avalanche Institute, told the Denver paper that he wonders whether aggressive snow-safety programs at resorts have lulled skiers into complacency.

“It’s almost like we are victims of our own success,” said Baugher, who is also ski patrol director at Washington’s Crystal Mountain Ski Area. “People blot out that the areas they are skiing — the steep and deep terrain — are at risk for avalanches because our snow-safety programs have been so successful.”

Telluride has had no fatal in-bounds avalanches, but neither has it opened up the treasure chest of Palmyra Peak, this year’s expansion into steep and wild former backcountry terrain. “I have a zero-tolerance policy,” said Craig Sterbenz, director of snow safety at Telluride. “If it’s not safe, it’s not open.”

 

Christmas could have been worse

ASPEN, Colo. – It could be a much, much worse winter — namely one with no snow. Instead, records for December snowfall from Telluride to Aspen Highlands tumbled. And the holiday schedule this year allowed for people to excuse two weeks of vacation.

That said, how are the ski towns doing economically?

If you can ignore the giant vacuum that used to be the real-estate sector, spot evidence suggests ski towns are doing reasonably well. Vail, Aspen and other ski towns have been packed at times, if spending is clearly more measured and restrained.

The Aspen Times reports that Christmas week lodging occupancy this year was 67 per cent, compared to 87 per cent for the same period last year.

Aspen Skiing Co. reported strong business at its ski areas over the holidays. More than 20,000 skier and snowboarder visits were recorded at its four skier mountains on one day, plus visits exceeding 18,000 on four consecutive days.

Vail Resorts, which has four ski areas in Colorado and one on the California-Nevada border, reported a 6 per cent decline in skier visits through the early season. Lift ticket revenue was down 7.5 per cent.

The bright side was that lodging wasn’t down as much as some had feared, just 15 per cent at the company’s hotels and condominiums, compared to the 23 per cent drop that had been projected as recently as November. The uptick was credited, in part, to “aggressive” promotional offers.

Aspen is also more aggressively offering deals. This week it announced package deals with Frontier Airlines and other partners that will shave $1,000 off the cost of a five-day ski vacation. January bookings have been at 58 per cent capacity, compared to 72 per cent last year.

Overall, Aspen Skiing projects 5 to 15 per cent fewer skier visits this season as compared to last year.

 

Aspen bomber likely robbed Vail bank

VAIL, Colo. – Craig Bettis, a sergeant in the Vail Police Department, was on his way to Aspen on New Year’s Eve when he stopped by his house. On the television, he saw a face he knew he’d seen before.

The individual who had left gasoline bombs at Aspen’s Vectra Bank, closing down that city’s downtown section, was the same man who had robbed Vail’s Westar Bank twice before, on Dec. 25, 2005, and July 3, 2006.

“I had stared at them probably a thousand times,” said Bettis, referring to the images taken at the Vail bank during the July robbery. Seeing the images from the Aspen bank, he added, was an “ah-hah moment.”

The individual, in both cases, was James Blanning, who later killed himself in a nature preserve near Aspen after shutting down the town’s downtown area on one of the busiest nights of the year. Blanning, 72, had grown up in Aspen and spent much of his life there, but had become embittered when his manipulations of mining claims put him in prison instead of in the lap of luxury.

 

Restaurants seek compensation

ASPEN, Colo. – A coalition of restaurants in Aspen is suing the estate of James Blanning, who killed himself on New Year’s Eve after first planting two bombs in two different banks and two more in a downtown alley. Left with the bombs were notes demanding $60,000 in cash. The threat closed down 16 square blocks of the downtown area for much of the afternoon and evening.

Scott Brasington, the co-owner of a restaurant, told the Aspen Daily News that the lawsuit is being done to “make a statement…. We feel it belongs to the restaurant workers who took a huge hit. It’s not just the restaurant owners — it’s the waiters, the waitresses, the bartenders, the guys in the kitchen.”

Several eateries reported losing $30,000 or more that night, notes the Daily News , which is typically one of the busiest and most profitable nights for restaurants in Aspen

 

Foreclosure actions begin

GRANBY, Colo. – Foreclosure proceedings have begun on Orvis Shorefox, which was to have been a high-end real-estate community along the banks of the Colorado River in Granby.

The pieces of the development began coming together in 2003 with purchase of the former Horn Ranch for $5.2 million. Work had begun on a golf course, and fly fishing was to have been a key attraction to buyers.

The project faces $60 million in foreclosures, reports the Sky-Hi Daily News , with the largest being a $40 million judicial foreclosure pursued by CNL Financial Group Inc., a real-estate investment company based in Florida. A lender, Aspen Shorefox, which is registered in Nevada, is seeking $20 million. The newspaper also reports that the development is the subject of civil actions on mechanics liens, which approach $12 million. Parts of these contracts, however, may have been paid.

The sale date of the Aspen Shorefox foreclosure has been set for June 12, 2009.

“Until the economy turns around and the housing market improves, it will be all but impossible for any land developer to resurrect a major project,” said Ron Stern, an attorney for Grand Elk, a real estate project that had been tangentially related to the Orvis Shorefox project.

The Sky-Hi Daily News also reports that Grand County had 173 foreclosed properties in 2008, more than triple the total of 2007.

 

Minturn project unaffected

MINTURN, Colo. – Things have gone down the toilet for the Ginn Co. at several of its real-estate projects in the Southeast. Does that mean its plans for a high-end, 1,700-unit project on former mining properties in the Vail-Minturn-Red Cliff area are headed for the same place?

No, says Ryan Julison, the company spokesman. “Every project is its own legal entity,” he tells the Vail Daily.

The newspaper also talked with a Florida real estate observer, Don “Toby” Tobin, who seems to think that the “Ginn brand has been tarnished.”

Again, Ginn Co. spokesman Julison disagrees. “If this (financial trouble) was just us, it would be a big deal,” he said. “But we’re in the midst of an economic slowdown that’s unprecedented.”

Ginn’s project for about 5,000 acres last year was annexed by Minturn, but development planning has been put on hold. Minturn officials have received $600,000 in cash from the developer as per the annexation agreement, but another $11.6 million is in escrow account for a recreation centre and other improvements. The money, however, can’t be touched until the company gets its final development approvals.

The Vail Daily says that the Ginn Co. in early January filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy for two of its resorts in Florida and announced a sale and restructuring of two others, which are located in North Carolina and the Grand Bahaman. The sales were necessary to repay $675 million in loans issued by Credit Suisse.

 

Real estate agents are thinning

ASPEN, Colo. – Membership in the Aspen Board of Realtors is down about 10 per cent from its peak last year of 732. The Aspen Times notes that membership began soaring in late 2002, increasing by 30 per cent in less than three years. With real estate sales down about 40 per cent, what happens next? Consolidated offices, says Greg Rulon, a long-time sales veteran.

 

Incremental pricing the carrot

ASPEN, Colo. – Incremental pricing for water use has become common as city governments and other utilities try to use higher costs to encourage conservation. The same principle is now being applied by some electricity providers, including the City of Aspen.

The new price structure adopted by the city council will result in those customers who use more electricity paying more per unit. The lowest priced electricity will be for those who use the least. Those who use large amounts will pay more per kilowatt hour. The resulting electrical bills could increases anywhere from 0.2 per cent to 30 per cent, said Phil Overeynder, the director of public works.

About two-thirds of Aspen residents buy their electricity from the city government. The balance of residents and businesses are customers of Holy Cross Electric.

About 75 per cent of electricity delivered by the city comes from wind and hydroelectric sources. The city hopes to inch that up to 100 per cent.

 

CO detectors cause evacuation

SNOWMASS VILLAGE, Colo. – A family of four died near Aspen on Thanksgiving when a disconnected exhaust pipe from a boiler resulted carbon monoxide infiltrate a home. Something even worse could have happened on New Year’s Eve in Snowmass Village, except that this time the carbon monoxide monitors triggered an alarm.

The Snowmass Village Sun explains that monitors revealed 377 parts per million were detected in one unit. The U.S. government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration says any reading over 10 parts per million is potentially harmful.

After 20 rooms in the lodge were evacuated, firefighters traced the carbon monoxide to a boiler within the building that had been worked on the previous afternoon. The boiler was shut down, and the guests readmitted.

After the Thanksgiving deaths, Pitkin County passed a law retroactively requiring carbon monoxide detectors in existing buildings. The Aspen City council this week adopted similar regulations, requiring detectors anywhere people sleep in Aspen.

Colorado lawmakers are considering a similar mandate. Denver newspapers note that lawmakers rejected such a requirement after homebuilders complained about liability and real-estate agents said they didn’t want to have to enforce it. In response, proposed legislation would put the onus of enforcement on local governments.

 

Sun Valley County? No bloody way

HAILEY, Idaho – A poll, albeit an unscientific one, shows overwhelming opposition to the idea of renaming Blaine County after its best-known feature, the Sun Valley ski area.

“To the outside world, we are known as the Sun Valley community’” said Larry Schoen, a county commissioner. But the more dominant position, says the Idaho Mountain Express, is expressed by resident Cathy Zaccardi, who said that the county’s heritage was not founded on skiing or the resort sector, which didn’t come along until 1936 when Union Pacific Railroad boss Averell Harriman created the ski resort at Ketchum. Before that, the county was a place of sheep ranchers, hard-rock miners and farmers.

 

Court overturns ban

DENVER, Colo. – The Colorado Supreme Court this week said that Summit County — and other counties — cannot ban the method called heap-leach that uses cyanide and acids to remove gold from ore. Gunnison, Gilpin, Conejos and Costilla counties had also adopted similar legislation.

“A patchwork of county-level bans on certain mining extraction methods would inhibit what the General Assembly has recognized as a necessary activity,” Justice Gregory Hobbs wrote for the majority. That necessary activity, he added, is the “orderly development of Colorado’s mineral resources.”

The counties had adopted the regulations after the Summitville mining disaster in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in the 1980s resulted in a badly polluted Alamosa River. The only remaining place where the same mining technique is used is on the western flanks of Pikes Peak, at the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Co.

Mining industry officials say Colorado’s state government has improved its regulatory oversight to prevent a recurrence of Summitville. County officials remain unconvinced.

“The state’s oversight of mining hasn’t been sufficient, and at the county level we don’t have the tools to deal with mining,” Summit county Commissioner Karn Stiegelmeier told the Denver Post . Counties, he added, now need “more clarity from the Legislature.”

John Taylor, legislative affairs director for Colorado Counties Inc., told the same newspaper that this case illustrates “ongoing tensions over what is in the state sphere and what is in the county’s, and how they coexist.”

 

Taoseños learning to navigate roundabout

TAOS, N.M. – Taoseños, as residents of Taos call themselves, are becoming familiar with how a traffic roundabout works.

Police told the Taos News that there had been no accidents at a new roundabout in Taos, the first on a highway in New Mexico. “Yes, they might scare themselves after going through the first time,” said Glen Baker, a high construction manager. “But it seems that regular travelers are getting the hang of it.”

Indeed, that was the case at Vail, Colo., which in the mid-1990s deployed the first modern roundabout in the West. There were predictions of mayhem, but the experience there — now replicated at hundreds of other locations — showed very much the contrary. While there is always a bit of anarchy in the flow of traffic, there are actually fewer accidents than occur at intersections governed by stop-signs or traffic signals. As well, the roundabouts accommodate much larger volumes of traffic.