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Cloud seeding in wilderness debated

PINEDALE, Wyo. – For the most part, environmental activists have shrugged off cloud-seeding. If intrinsically distrustful of tinkering with nature, they have seemed to see cloud-seeding as among the least of their worries.

PINEDALE, Wyo. – For the most part, environmental activists have shrugged off cloud-seeding. If intrinsically distrustful of tinkering with nature, they have seemed to see cloud-seeding as among the least of their worries.

And, for that matter, water-providers and ski areas have for the most part kept their distance from cloud-seeding, with several notable exceptions: Vail and Beaver Creek since 1978, a Durango-based water district for about as many years, and Crested Butte for the last several years. As well, several agriculture-based districts in Central Utah and some hydroelectric companies in the Sierra Nevada have seeded clouds for decades, the latter since the 1950s.

Some scientifically rigorous experiments have been done, most notably near Colorado’s Climax Mine in the 1960s and 1970s. Those experiments showed cloud-seeding caused augmentations of snowpacks by 10 to 15 per cent.

Still, the efficiency of cloud-seeding remains disputed. And the federal government has been clear for about 25 years that it will provide little or no money for basic research, winter or summer.

But pushed by cattle and sheep ranchers in Wyoming, the State Legislature there has appropriated $8.9 million for cloud-seeding research during the next five years. The project has two components, one in the Sierra Madres, in the area between Laramie, Wyo., and Steamboat Springs, Colo. There a double-blind experiment is planned to better refine under what conditions cloud-seeding works and to what degree.

A second component proposes to seed clouds on their way to the Wind River Range, located southeast of Jackson Hole. The intent there is less pure science, and more just the goal of producing more water. Slow-melting snow, after all, is like a reservoir in the West.

Environmental groups are distrustful of the cloud-seeding, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide. “It’s fraught with such peril,” says Sierra Club spokesman Steve Thomas. “Trying to manipulate precipitation is generally not a good idea. It has impacts that people are not anticipating.”

And environmentalists believe they have a legal ax to grind, at least in this case. “The idea of attempting to manipulate a wilderness ecosystem in one of the few areas where we’ve decided, as a society, that we are not going to try to manipulate, flies in the face of the concept of wilderness,” said George Nickas, executive director of the Wilderness Watch.

Because the Wind River Range is mostly in designated wilderness, cloud-seeding raises serious policy and serious legal questions, Nickas said. He did not, however, say whether he believes his or other environmental groups will make this a line-in-the-sand case.

 

Blixseths split assets

BIG SKY, Mont. – Tim and Edra Blixseth are getting divorced after 25 years together, and boy, what a lot of sheets they have to split.

The Wall Street Journal reports the pair is now peacefully dividing their fortune, which is estimated by Forbes at $1.5 billion to $2 billion. Included in that estate is the Yellowstone Club, the pricey members-only ski and golf community near the Big Sky ski area of Montana. Among the members: Bill Gates. Also included are vast tracts of land in Idaho between Boise and McCall, a fast-developing resort area.

“Rather than fighting over every piece of silver, the Blixseths decided to keep what’s most important to each of them and split the difference,” reports the Journal. “Life’s too short, they figured, and why give the lawyers all the money if you can work it out yourselves.”

She, at least for now, gets the dogs, a golden retriever and a Shi Tzu. She also gets the couple’s house at Palm Springs, which includes a 19-hole golf course, eight cottages and casitas, all of this with an estimated sales price of $200 million — the most expensive home in the country, if it were put on the market.

He gets the cabins at the Yellowstone club, a condo in Boise, a yacht and several of the businesses. They will continue to share three private jets and the Yellowstone Club.

Of course, adds the Journal, the deal could go bad. “This is not to say that the whole thing won’t blow up in court,” Edra tells the newspaper. “But unless one of us does something out of character, I don’t think it will.”

 

Rapid help not enough

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Again comes sad testimony that you need not be buried by snow to die in an avalanche.

The evidence this time is from the backcountry immediately adjacent to the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. There, three skiers were at a cliff called Fat Bastard, planning to ski a chute described as extreme terrain. Avalanche danger that day had been reported as moderate, and indeed, seven people had been caught in the Southern Tetons by an avalanche the previous day, although none were killed.

The avalanche at Fat Bastard caught all three skiers. By one account, two of the skiers were buried up to their necks. Other skiers who arrived shortly dug them out. The third skier was uncovered rapidly, but was unconscious.

Help arrived within five minutes, perhaps as quickly as one minute. It was for naught. A doctor at the scene declared the man dead before a helicopter arrived, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide. The Teton County coroner attributed death to massive internal injuries.

The dead skier, Justin Kautz, 25, was remembered as a devout Christian who gave away money to those he believed had needs greater than his own, but also as someone who loved the exhilaration of skiing. He just loved to go fast and scream and yell and just have fun, one friend told the newspaper. He worked as a front desk clerk, but had also been published in a telemark magazine.

“He had deep faith in the redemptive power of God, which enabled him to stand up for what was right, regardless of the consequences,” said his father, Will Kautz, in an interview with the Valley News of White River Junction, Vt. “He was the best son any dad could ever have.”

 

Christmas robust at resorts

With cherry trees blossoming in Washington D.C., and people sunbathing in New York City, the problems of ski areas in the East are obvious. The Alps also continued to hurt.

But the North American West is another matter. Everyone, it would seem, had a very, very good Christmas. Aspen had the second best day in 10 years. The Telluride Watch reports a likely three-day record at the ski area there. Steamboat’s Pilot & Today reported the largest crowds ever at the ski area. Park City’s buses carried a record number of passengers.

 

Hypothermic kayaker saved

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – A kayaker barely survived a trip onto Lake Tahoe on New Year’s Eve. The woman called 911 in the afternoon, saying she was cold, tired, and lost.

When the woman failed to answer calls, the U.S. Coast Guard dispatched first a helicopter and then two boats. Two hours later she was found, after searchers traced her cell phone to a particular cell phone tower. She was five miles off-shore in a small, inflatable kayak.

“She was hypothermic and mumbling and couldn’t talk,” said Joshua Martin, an executive petty officer for the Coast Guard. “The cold from the water will suck the heat out of you through the kayak. She was lucky.”

Martin told the Tahoe Daily Tribune winds had swept the woman far out onto the lake, where she became disoriented.

 

Doc helps Stones stay high

TELLURIDE, Colo. – The Rolling Stones last fall were scheduled to play in Mexico City, which has an elevation of 7,342 feet. Worried a bit about the thin, polluted air there, the band turned to Telluride’s Peter Hackett, one of the world’s premiere authorities on high-altitude medicine and physiology.

As a doctor, Hackett has worked extensively on Mt. Denali and also in the Himalaya. He is also an accomplished climber, and in fact, climbed Everest solo from the South Col to the summit. He has worked at the Telluride Medical Center for six years.

Hackett told The Telluride Watch that he did relatively little work during the band’s 16-city tour. Not surprisingly, he said he was most concerned about Keith Richards, who had suffered a brain hemorrhage after falling out of palm tree last April. But Richards, who is 63, had no problems, nor did any of the other 60something band members or the 40-member entourage. The most challenging situation was in Chicago, where the band played in freezing temperatures.

 

Airport to cut gases

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Thinking of greenhouse gas emissions, the Jackson Hole Airport is taking steps to reduce power use. This comes partly at the prodding of the Jackson town government, which was energized by a conference on climate change held in Aspen during October to improve energy efficiency.

In November, the directors of the airport voted to buy 20 per cent of their energy from renewable sources, despite the incremental added cost of $9,000 per year. Then the board had an energy audit. The most immediate repercussion will be to change out light bulbs to more efficient types.

 

  Agents urged to learn green

EAGLE, Colo. – Environmental activists in the Eagle Valley are pushing for real-estate agents to become certified as ecobrokers. Ecobrokers are certified to provide insight into the costs and savings associated with things like insulation, double-paned windows, and ultra-efficient heating and cooling systems, for example, explained the Vail Daily.

The Eagle Valley, where Vail is located, only has one such real estate agent certified in green ways.

 

A poster child for excess?

VAIL PASS, Colo. – In 1999, a Canadian lynx from among the first transplanted batch of reintroduced lynx release into Colorado was squashed on Interstate 70 near Vail Pass, and three more have subsequently died on the same highway between Vail and Denver. As well, in 2003, the first wolf verified in Colorado in 60 years was also killed on I-70, near Idaho Springs.

The deaths of the wolf and lynx, both of them endangered species, seemed to verify what wildlife biologists had long been saying, that I-70 had become a Berlin Wall to wildlife. Even before these deaths, the biologists had been working to get structures, called wildlife overpasses, installed across I-70 and other highways.

In response, Congress in 2005 approved something called a congressional spending earmark. Planning of a wildlife overpass west of the pass, near where the lynx died, has been allocated $420,000. The model for such overpasses is in Alberta’s Banff National Park, where activists are working to preserve remnant populations of grizzly bears and wolves, as well as the more plentiful elk, moose, and black bears.

But that Congressional earmark, reports the Wall Street Journal, was opposed by Colorado’s highway boss, Tom Norton, who believes wildlife can be protected at less cost. “Earmarks make my life miserable,” he groused.

The Journal made the overpass the centerpieces for the argument against earmarks, which have become more popular in recent years. Such earmarks made up 4 per cent of the roughly $1 trillion that Congress allocated in the 2005 fiscal year. Last year’s transportation authorization also included a $223 million earmark for a bridge to a sparsely populated Alaskan island. The new Democratic majority in Congress has pledged to diminish use of earmarks, as a way to rein in the burgeoning federal budget.

Norton seemed to be saying that if the federal money was not earmarked, he could use it for building highways. Colorado is notoriously pressed to build highways fast enough to keep up with population growth and steadily increasing driving by people, something measured statistically as vehicle-miles-traveled per capita.

But the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, an advocacy group that lobbied Congress for the earmark, says the Journal got the story at least partly wrong. The wildlife overpass budget came from a separate pot of money, not directly from Colorado’s allocation for transportation, said the group’s executive director, Monique DiGiorgio. She also points out that if I-70 is to be expanded, it must mitigate effects to wildlife. This is merely an early-action plan.

Too, while Norton said he thought fences and small underpasses would serve the same purpose at less expense than the football-field-wide wildlife overpasses, wildlife biologists dispute that solution as ineffectual for a variety of reasons.

 

Use of mag chloride suspended

SANTA FE, N.M. – Magnesium chloride has been blamed in the death of a driver in New Mexico. The New Mexican reports that the driver died after her vehicle slipped on a road covered with the de-icing chemical. Three other crashes, none of them fatal, also were blamed on mag chloride.

A Santa Fe County sheriff’s department investigation said a bald tire on the victim’s car contributed to the crash.

New Mexico transportation officials suspended use of magnesium chloride, which lowers the freezing point and prevents snow from binding to the road surface.

Use of magnesium chloride has been hotly contested in several Colorado valleys, although publicity has died down in the last two years.

However, a letter-writer in Ketchum’s Idaho Mountain Express took aim at mag chloride, recounting the uncertainty and the adversities of the chemical. “It is our responsibility to demand the termination of the use of this harmful substance,” concluded the writer, Karen McCall.

Defenders of mag chloride point out that the science remains inconclusive, and that it is without doubt that mag chloride creates generally safer driving conditions. The alternatives, sand and cinders, pollute waterways and the air.

 

A sign of liberation?

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – Crested Butte has had wet T-shirt contests through the years, and Aleesha Towns, editor of the Crested Butte News, isn’t enamored of them.

“To be honest, it’s hard to explain why events like topless parties and wet T-shirt contests bother me so much. Part of me wonders if I should embrace it as women taking control of their sexuality and choosing to display it publicly,” she writes. “These are grown women, and if they want to get doused with water, cut their shirts open, and give lap dances with hundreds of onlookers, then should I just say ‘rock on” and leave it?”

“But something tells me that most events like T-shirt contests are not done in celebration of female emancipation,” she adds. And while Crested Butte always needs fresh, fun energy, she’s dubious this is the “genuine” Colorado as billed by the resort.

 

Taxing district studied

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. – In the arc of bark beetles from Vail to Grand Lake, the story has always essentially been one of who will pay? Trees can be removed, the forests thinned to make them less prone to catastrophic fires. But there is always a cost to do so.

On private land, the cost is clearly to be borne by landowners. But the national forests that border the resort valleys are a trickier case. There are few customers for the wood, with sawmills closed 20 to 30 years ago in most mountain towns, and the remaining sawmills 100, 200 miles or more from the forests of dead trees. Foresters predict up to 90 per cent morality in some stands of lodgepole pines.

In response, reports the Summit Daily News, Colorado legislators for this area are assembling a proposed law that would create a district funded by property taxes. The money would be used for what is often called forest health. The district, if authorized by the Legislature, would have to be approved by affected property owners.

Approval is problematic, noted Gary Severson, executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments. A property owner who built in a town, well away from fire danger, might well object to helping pay to reduce fire danger of somebody who had built a home next to a national forest.

The Summit Daily also reports talk that Denver Water, which collects water from both Summit County and the Fraser Valley, might be persuaded to help pay for forestry projects as a preventative measure. A 1996 fire in the city’s water collection areas southwest of Denver caused expense of $20 million in cleaning silt and ash from reservoirs.

 

Even at birth, girls are in the minority

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – Even at birth, males outnumber females in Steamboat Springs. There, the Steamboat Pilot & Today reports a record crop last year of young-ones, 430 altogether, last year at Yampa Valley Medical Center. Some 56 per cent were males, and the most favored name was Ethan. For girls, Grace was favored, but Haley was just as common, if in five variant spellings. Parents must agree with Mark Twain, who complained that spelling something the same was as tiresome as having all clothes alike. “Variety is pleasing,” he said.

 

Grade-school parents push for dual-language

CARBONDALE, Colo. – Several Anglo parents of students at a public elementary school in Carbondale, located 30 miles down-valley from Aspen, are pushing for fully bilingual instruction, called dual language. Students at the school are mostly Latino.

Nearby at an elementary school in Basalt, a dual-language program has existed for 10 years — and has achieved strong results, says Colin Laird, who has a third-grader at the Carbondale school. “It seems valuable in Basalt. Maybe it will work here,” he told the Valley Journal. “Given our demographics, it seems like a perfect fit.”

At the Carbondale school, about 80 per cent of the students are Latinos, and many are learning English. That statistic does not mirror the demographics of the town, as many Anglo, English-speaking parents removed their children from the public school. Some were distressed when the Montessori component of the school was removed, and so they formed their own, Montessori-method-based, school. But poor scores on state-mandated tests, commonly called C-SAPs, the result of so many students learning English, also disturbed many parents.

Laird said he sees the situation as an opportunity. Children who have grown up in Spanish-speaking households learn English, and English-speaking students learn Spanish. Such dual-language programs are being used across the country, to great success, in similar situations, he told The Aspen Times.

Students in the school already have 45 minutes per day of instruction. In addition, the elementary school has 18 kindergarten students who are in a pilot literacy program, a precursor to a dual-language program.

 

Alcohol stores have clean slate in Jackson

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Liquor-dispensing businesses in Jackson learned their lesson. In December, a third of businesses were willing to sell liquor to an underage decoy working for the local political department. Two weeks later, none of the 21 businesses tempted bit, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

 

Ex-Wyoming senator discloses Ford aside

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Assassins twice tried to kill former president Jerry Ford, who died Dec. 26 at the age of 93. A Secret Service agent who saved his life was gay.

The word later was that Ford looked down on the agent, but former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson tells Planet Jackson Hole this was false. Simpson said that in 2000 he had invited Ford to become a director of the Republican Unity Coalition, a big-tent alliance of both homosexual and heterosexual Republicans.

“He said, ‘Al, I don’t do boards anymore, but I’ll do that with you and I’ll tell you why,” Simpson remember Ford saying. Ford then explained the rumour about him thinking less of the Secret Service agent, and how it was wrong. The real story, he said, was that the agent was a dear friend, who shared Christmases and dinners with the Ford family.