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Top-end health spa checking out Canada

Compiled by Allen Best CANMORE, Alberta — The Canyon Ranch, a well-known health and leisure spa based in Arizona, is being wooed by developers in Canmore.

Compiled by Allen Best

CANMORE, Alberta — The Canyon Ranch, a well-known health and leisure spa based in Arizona, is being wooed by developers in Canmore.

Canyon Ranch spas are not just the place for massages, facials and saunas, notes the Rocky Mountain Outlook. If it locates at Three Sisters Mountain Villages, a major new project being developed at Canmore, then Canyon Ranch will have connections to hospitals and universities in Alberta in line with its emphasis on health and wellness.

A facility at Canmore’s Three Sisters Mountain Villages would be at least 20,000 square feet, says Terry Minger, a Colorado-based consultant to the project in Canmore, and a consultant to Whistler in the ’70s and early ’80s. Canyon Ranch has a staff of about 30 doctors and post-graduate researchers at its facilities, and operates as a research institute as well as a wellness centre.

Minger said Canyon Ranch also wants to work with Alberta Health to see where it could fit in with the government’s new focus on health and wellness.

The Three Sisters Mountain Villages project had been planned as primarily a golf and hotel complex, but last year switched its focus to a health and wellness resort.

Minger said other areas, including Whistler and Vancouver, are also trying to woo Canyon Ranch.

Vietnam vet remembers

TELLURIDE, Colo. — This presidential election this year has special reverberations in the mountain towns of the West. Dick Cheney has a home in Jackson Hole, while John Kerry hangs out at Sun Valley. And, it turns out, one of Kerry’s fellow sailors from Vietnam, Jim Russell, has been living in Telluride since the late 1970s.

Russell, a restaurateur, was in the national news in August when he broke his self-imposed silence about Vietnam to defend Kerry’s version of his courageous action when his Swift boat came under attack. A group of Vietnam veterans who have ties to President George W. Bush have questioned both his injuries and also the danger Kerry was in.

"Anyone who doesn’t think that we were being fired upon must have been on a different river," writes Russell in The Telluride Watch, recalling the event of March 13, 1969. "The picture I have in my mind of Kerry bending over from his boat picking some hapless guy out of the river while all hell was breaking loose around us is a picture based on fact, and it cannot be disputed or changed."

Russell descried the version disseminated by "Swift Boats Veterans for the Truth" as an "evil extreme right-wing attack."

Another Swift boat veteran, although he did not serve directly with Kerry, lives in the Vail area. Ted Kenney, a former stockbroker, didn’t take sides in his analysis of the controversy, but did recall how uncomfortable it was being a Vietnam vet for many years after returning state-side.

Hope for housing

ASPEN, Colo. — Aspen is within striking distance of its affordable housing goal, reports The Aspen Times.

There are currently 2,528 homes in a mixture of sizes, including for-sale and for-rent. Of those, 548 have been added in the last four years. If everything now being planned is actually built, including a major 330-unit project, then conceivably the involvement by Aspen city and Pitkin County officials could wind down.

The community has several times tried to quantify how much housing it needs to retain a critical mass of residents who live and work here. In 1993, a community plan identified the threshold at 60 per cent of the local workforce that should live in the upper valley.

More planes, but not skiers

KETCHUM, Idaho — Ski towns and valleys in the West are seen as tourist resorts, and they are that. But a different kind of tourism has become a major tail-wagger in the last 15 years. In this new economic pattern, second homes play a much bigger role. And ski areas have more people who live there who are not necessarily connected to the tourism industry.

This would seem to be the central operative idea at work in a story out of Ketchum, where a new airport is being discussed. Wally Huffman, who is general manager for the Sun Valley Company which operates the ski area, questioned whether all that much more travel is being done to the resort. After all, he pointed out, the number of lodging beds had declined – something that happened during the 1990s at many major destination resorts in the West. And although he didn’t report it, Sun Valley’s skier days during the 1990s stalled – something that also happened at many resorts across the West.

In fact, according to an airport consultant, Tom Schnetzer, the number of airline passengers passing through the existing airport serving Sun Valley/Ketchum doubled from 1990 to 2003. Travel by local residents seemed to be a big part of that increase. And the increase might have been higher had not so many travellers gone to Boise to get cheaper air fares.

However, the consultant had not very deliberately addressed how the second-home owners fit into this picture. A report to that effect has been requested, reports the Idaho Mountain Express.

Labour wars book lauded

TELLURIDE, Colo. — A new book by author Maryjoy Martin about Telluride’s bloody labour war has been issued, and her effort, The Corpse on Boomerang Road: Telluride's War on Labor 1899-1908, is drawing praise in nearby towns.

Telluride’s troubles were part of a general drive by miners at camps across the West in the early 1900s to get improved working and living conditions. In Telluride, the Western Federation of Miners, a more militant union, called a strike in 1901. While most mine operators were willing to bargain, some refused and hired gunmen. A law-and-order Colorado governor dispatched the militia, which abused civil rights of the miners. The result was a town at war with itself. An estimated 800 people were killed in four years.

Writing in the Durango Herald, critic Charlie Langdon calls it a "compelling, startling and unnerving tale." Noting that Telluride on Labour Day weekend will be teeming with Hollywood types at the film festival, he mused that maybe her book would become the basis for major Hollywood film. "It’s a natural for big screen," he said.

Telluride history buff Art Goodtimes called it a "terrific" work. "This is not dull librarian’s study bait, or racy revisionists pseudo-history," he said.

Scott opposes Jumbo

INVERMERE, B.C. — Beckie Scott, an Olympic gold medalist in cross-country skiing at the 2002 Winter Games, has joined public opponents of a proposed ski resort at Jumbo Glacier. A decision on the $450 million project is just weeks away.

"I have had the good fortune to travel the world through my sport," she told the Invermere Valley Echo. "The one thing we have in Canada that is so rare everywhere else is wilderness and wildlife…. Instead of trying to duplicate the highly developed European Alps, we should be protecting the natural resources that differentiate SuperNatural B.C. from the rest of the world."

Regional district OKs plan

REVELSTOKE, B.C. — Plans for a major international ski resort at Mount Mackenzie, adjacent to Revelstoke, seem to have cleared a minor hurdle. The regional district in which the ski resort would be located has given its OK based on several conditions. Among those conditions is that the resort be annexed into Revelstoke and that local waters be protected from the impacts of development, reports the Revelstoke Times Review.

Wal-Mart not wanted

GUNNISON, Colo. — Another Colorado mountain town is putting out a no-vacancy sign to Wal-Mart. Earlier this summer Pagosa Springs and surrounding Archuleta County, located east of Durango, imposed a moratorium on big-box retail stores. Now, Gunnison has done the same for stores of more than 50,000 square feet.

Wal-Mart already has a store in Gunnison, which is located about 27 miles from Crested Butte, but it’s a smallish affair. Wal-Mart wants a store more than triple the size, at 150,000 square feet.

It’s been a heated time, with council members who didn’t adopt the moratorium being threatened with recall. Among the few vocal supporters of the Wal-Mart expansion, reports the Crested Butte News, is local businessman, Jim Pike. He said he supports shopping locally, but when he goes to Wal-Mart’s big store in Montrose, located 60 miles away, he always sees people from Gunnison shopping there. Ergo, they might as well shop at a big Wal-Mart in Gunnison, keeping the sales tax dollars are home for construction of a swimming pool and other community improvements.

Park City to ban big boxes

PARK CITY, Utah — A master plan is being put together for a section of land that the Park Record identifies as the current "back door" to Park City. But that area, called Quinn’s Junction, is likely to become the city’s front door, hence the concern about getting it right. And how do you get it right? For starters, by banning big-box retailers as well as "large expanses of surface parking," reports the newspaper.

Quiet please!

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, Colo. — Snowmobiles aren’t the only vehicles that should be regulated in national parks, says William Sarokin of Mount Cisco, N.Y., after returning from vacations from two parks located in Colorado, Rocky Mountain and Mesa Verde.

"Hundreds of people were quietly enjoying two of the most beautiful campgrounds in the world but the experience was marred by a few people with recreational vehicles constantly running their generators so that they could watch TV," he writes in a letter published in The New York Times. "They made the parks seem like bus depots."

Elk becoming a problem

GRAND LAKE, Colo. — The number of elk in Rocky Mountain National Park is hardly natural. Population growth is unchecked by wolves, who long ago were exterminated, and by human hunters, who are banned from the park. The elk are now causing damage to vegetation, affecting other creatures.

The National Park Service is now considering several options for reducing the elk herd, one of them reintroducing 14 to 20 wolves. Also being considered is shooting some elk or conducting fertility control.

In reporting the story, the Sky-Hi News explained that a "reversible fertility control agent using a time-released compound to effectively inhibit reproduction in cow elk for multiple years" would be used.

Wolves get taste of beef

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is busy trying to keep the wolves from killing cattle in Grand Teton National Park. The wildlife agents fired cracker shells and turned on bright lights after a wolf pack that took up residence in the park five years ago killed a 400-pound calf.

While such techniques sometimes work in the short term, a wildlife agent told the Jackson Hole News & Guide, they have not worked in chronic situations.

The cattle in this case happened to be on the way to where elk herds are located. As such, says Franz Camenzind, executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, the cattle should be removed before the wolves get a taste for beef. "It’s like having a field trip every day with your third-graders, right through the middle of the candy store, and expecting them not to get addicted to candy," he said.

Meanwhile, the population of wolves centred in Yellowstone National Park, which is adjacent to Grand Teton National Park, continues to grow. By December there could be 850 wolves, a 10 per cent increase from last year.

What trial?

EAGLE, Colo. — Jury selection for the Kobe Bryant trial began last Friday in Eagle. It would be, you might suppose, impossible not to be aware of the hubbub, with 300 potential jurors arriving and another 600 journalists arriving in the town, which was described in early press accounts as "tiny."

Not so. "What happened today?" answered a woman when asked if she had noticed anything unusual. The Eagle County Justice Center, the centre for the legal drama, is located about a half-mile from her home.

The woman, a school teacher consumed with a new school year, later learned what was happening in her neighbourhood after listening to a National Public Radio report broadcast from Washington D.C.

For those who did happen by the justice centre, rows of white tents make it look like the county fair is going on. All that is missing is the Ferris wheel.

Train blasts to cease

WINTER PARK, Colo. — Come December, some people should be sleeping better in Winter Park, a town and resort bisected by transcontinental railroad tracks.

The town is really a product of the railroad, but as in such things many newcomers never quite got accustomed to the sound of trains blaring a few dozen yards away. Several years ago, the town council got national attention when it passed a law prohibiting the blowing of horns by trains within the town limits. Citing concerns about the safety of motorists at crossings, the railroad ignored the law.

But new regulations from the Federal Transportation Department allow concrete medians that make it impossible for impatient drivers of cars and trucks to wheel around the cross-bars at railroad crossings, exposing themselves to risk. Their construction, commending in September, will allow the locomotive engineers to lay off their horns beginning in December, providing locals with what the Winter Park Manifest describes as "sweet relief."

How does your garden grow?

MINTURN, Colo. — The evidence on behalf of global warming is starting to come in, with most of the highest mean average temperatures on record having been recorded since 1990. Mountain towns have been no exception.

That has led to some rather daring adventures. In Minturn, an old railroad town located around the corner from Vail, somebody’s garden included a row of corn plants. Alas, when the first hard frost of the season stalked Minturn on Aug. 27, the corn was not even waist-high. A true farmer might say there was no shock that came out of this experiment, only a kernel of truth.

Durango tops for cyber cowboys

DURANGO, Colo. — Durango is a "telecommuting heaven" says Fortune. Also in the magazine’s top-10 are two other ski (sort of) towns: Sandpoint, Idaho, and Bend, Ore.

Among the obvious attractions of the great outdoors in Durango is a decided indoor interest: eating. Durango, says the magazine, has almost as many restaurants in its downtown area, per capita, as San Francisco.