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Mountain News: Snowboarding bad for Kerry’s image in Ohio Compiled by Allen Best COLUMBUS, Ohio — John Kerry is not getting the traction with the working class in Ohio that many people think he should.

Mountain News: Snowboarding bad for Kerry’s image in Ohio

Compiled by Allen Best

COLUMBUS, Ohio — John Kerry is not getting the traction with the working class in Ohio that many people think he should. Instead, the state is edging toward George W. Bush. It is, says one campaign consultant who has worked in Ohio for 30 years, a matter of presenting the wrong image – things like snowboarding.

"I smell the same New England genius that I smelled in the Dukakis campaign in 1988," Gerald Austin of Cleveland told The New York Times. "Kerry wants to run as a man of the people, and where do they put him for photo opportunities? Snowboarding in Sun Valley, shooting skeet in the Ohio Valley, and windsurfing off that great working-class vacation paradise, Nantucket. Democrats – at least Ohio Democrats – play softball and touch football."

Halt war on non-natives!

TELLURIDE, Colo. — In Telluride and the San Miguel Valley, the invasion of exotic plant species is taken seriously. The front page of The Telluride Watch each week has an "invasive of the week" featuring such plants as leafy spurge and musk thistle.

Invasives were brought to North American from Eurasia and are now crowding out the natives. The problem, say some scientists, is even more menacing than that of global warming.

But one Telluride resident says too much already! Ilene Barth says a town employee informed her that neither the town nor the county was happy about the tansy, an invasive non-native plant, growing in her yard, and that the plant should be removed.

Well, said Barth, she is also non-native, and the peaches she favours are non-natives. This drive to "erase the movement of the last several centuries toward diversity" had gone entirely too far, she contends. The authorities were so agitated about the sinner plants that they were willing to take up herbicides!

Ecologists would generally say that Barth doesn’t understand what’s going on. Instead of creating greater diversity, the invasives are creating less diversity. Lacking the insects and diseases of Eurasia that control their spread, these invasives are choking out pre-existing vegetation in North America.

Films limited to 7 minutes

CANMORE, Alberta — Lots of ski and gateway towns have film festivals, but none quite like the one in Canmore. There, the Seven Minute Film Festival is in its fourth year and has gained international recognition.

This year’s festival in late September has entries from four nations, including Canada, reports the Rocky Mountain Outlook. Organizers expect more than 100 films, with everything from comedy, drama, horror and even animated puppetry porn.

Gunnison to pay for cloud-seeding

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — Gunnison County is signing on to have the clouds seeded there again this winter, the third straight year. Cost is projected to be $92,000. The county commissioners figured at the outset that they would do this for five years, in order to measure the effectiveness of seeding, explains the Crested Butte News.

Cloud-seeders say they can boost precipitation from clouds 10 to 20 per cent, but also point out that if they don’t have clouds, as is common in cases of drought, then they can’t produce snow from nothing.

How valid are the claims of 10 to 20 per cent? That’s hard to answer, as there have been almost no double-blind experiments, which scientists say is necessary to deliver unbiased results. Results from operations have in-built biases. A national study released last year said the best evidence for winter cloud-seeding came from experiments done in the Leadville-Breckenridge-Vail area of Colorado in the 1960s.

More private golf planned

JACKSON HOLE, Colo. — Expensive, private and almost-private golf courses are proliferating in Jackson Hole. There are two now, with three more planned . That means 900 more memberships, some at a cost of $100,000 plus annual dues, on top of the existing 920 memberships.

In reporting this, the Jackson Hole News & Guide wonders whether the market truly exist for this much private and every expensive golf? The newspaper found several reports from 2001 that of supply outstripping demand, with the result of bankruptcies in beach resorts. However, the newspaper cited no evidence of financial difficulty in mountain resort valleys.

David Hutchinson, president of Valley Blue Sky Inc., a group of investors from Aspen and Sun Valley who are buying a planned golf course and real estate complex called Canyon Club, argues that there will be demand for "thing that are special and of high quality."

The newspaper did find an expert who concluded that to make private golf courses work in high-mountain valleys with their short playing seasons that real estate has to be part of the proposition.

Durango condo prices jump

DURANGO, Colo. — Condominiums are skyrocketing in price in Durango. The Durango Herald, citing the Durango Area Association of Realtors, says the median cost of a condo rose from $122,000 last summer to $193,750 this summer. In the smaller condos, prices two years ago of $130 per square foot have surged to $170 per square foot.

Home sales up, retail down

WINTER PARK, Colo. — What the Winter Park Manifest describes as a "quantum leap for real estate" has occurred. Last year, real estate sales in that area doubled. Another large gain has occurred through August of this year, with $47 million in sales compared to $35 million for the same time last year.

Clearly the market was more brisk, and also some high-end homes have been coming on line. Still, selling price of condominiums remained study at $190,000.

Down-river at Granby, median home prices jumped 41 per cent. The increase is probably due to the new inventory of stick-built vacation homes, not solely to the appreciation of the town’s existing inventory of pre-fab houses.

A surprising footnote to this surging real estate economy at Winter Park is the news of sales tax collections that during July dropped 11 per cent. That may be due to flagging interest in music festivals that have become a staple of Winter Park’s cultural – and economic – summer. Music festivals across the United States fell on hard times this year.

Real estate market brisk

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — As nearly everywhere else in resort valleys of the West, the real-estate agents in Summit County have been doing brisk business. Total sales for the first half of this year were more than double the same period last year.

Units priced below $600,000 moved most rapidly, and the softest market was in ski-in, ski-out condominiums priced at $500,000 to $1 million, one agent told the Summit Daily News.

Taxes or buses in Roaring Fork

ROARING FORK VALLEY, Colo. — For decades, Aspen resisted widening of the key highway to the outside world, seeking instead to improve mass transit.

Now, nearly all of that key road, Highway 82, has been four-laned, and the bus agency, Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, says it needs either an increase in the sales tax of 0.2 per cent or it will have to lay off nearly a fifth of its workers, a maximum of 210 people during winter.

The agency provides bus service between Aspen and Rifle, a distance of about 75 miles, with service along portions of that valley beginning at 6:15 a.m. and continuing until 2:15 a.m. Unless the tax is approved, reports The Aspen Times, bus routes must be curtailed.

Park City hotter

PARK CITY, Utah — Summers have become hotter in Park City over the years, but Roger Strand does not chalk it up to global warming.

Strand, who has had a heating and air conditioning business for several decades, says the building of driveways, dark roofs, non-indigenous trees, golf courses, lakes and ponds has changed the way the ground absorbs heat. All of this adds up to a man-made heat wave, he told The Park Record.

While scientists have long recognized localized temperature increases due to changed land uses, they also say that the globe in general has become warmer, more than a degree Fahrenheit during the last 20 years. Some places, such as mountain tops and Alaska, generally have become much warmer yet.

Strategy revised to halt decline

LAKE TAHOE, Colo. — Work has begun on a new strategy to reverse the decline of Lake Tahoe, which has lost one-third of its clarity since the late 1960s. Scientists say the decline could become irreversible unless remedial steps are taken during the next 15 to 20 years.

A consortium of local, state, and federal agencies are responsible for protecting the 1,645-foot-deep lake, which straddles the California-Nevada border. The lake’s quality is tied closely to the activities on land around the shore.

To reduce pollution, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has tightly restricted development, allowing only 225 new homes per year in the basin. Local jurisdictions are given permits based on their progress toward achieving key environmental goals, explains the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The new strategy will be geared toward finding new ways to control sediment and settling dust, reports the Contra Costa Times. Automobile driving in the Tahoe Basin could be restricted, while property owners could see new building limits. On the other hand, developers could be allowed to pay fees that will be used to pay for pollution controls. That, in turn, could loosen some construction rules.

The agencies are going heavy in the front-end public involvement, in hopes of avoiding the legal challenges that were mounted after the existing plan was first released in 1984.

Michael Donahoe, of the Tahoe Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the project, called Pathway 2007, because it is to be complete by 2007, has "incredible potential" to help Lake Tahoe’s future. He warned against giving too much weight to local business interests. "Most of the people in this basin want to protect the lake, but you have a few that still see it as their own profit centre. For them, it’s for sale," said Donahoe. "The preservation of this lake ought to be primary."

Gold-mining still poisoning fish

LAKE NATOMA, Calif. — Some 150 years ago the immigrant gold miners into the California foothills used an estimated 8.5 million pounds of mercury to separate gold from ore.

Now, new immigrants are being warned not to eat the fish from some lakes and rivers east of Sacramento because of dangerously high levels of mercury. Preparing brochures in several different languages, health officers are targeting Asian, Russian, and Latino anglers, people who tend to eat a lot of the fish that they catch.

Tests show mercury levels as high as 1.02 parts per million in bass and 1.89 parts per million in channel catfish, reports the Sacramento Bee. That’s three to six times the threshold established by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Salmon and trout, two of the most popular local sport fish, tend to accumulate relatively low levels of mercury, say scientists. As a result, most people can safely eat those fish three times a week, although women of childbearing age can eat them only once a week.

Resorts blotting out night sky

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — Climb the highest mountain, and you still can’t get away from light pollution. That’s the report in the Summit Daily News, which tells about an observatory atop Mount Evans, a 14,000-foot peak located about halfway between Breckenridge and Denver.

Among the observatory’s tasks is to track near-earth asteroids, which periodically in the past have crashed into the Earth. One such collision, about 65 million years ago, is believed to have caused the extinction of most earthly life forms.

But the observatory’s work is increasingly disrupted by light pollution. While the pollution from Summit County is still relatively small, it has grown measurably in the past 10 to 15 years. Dr. Robert Stencel, director of the observatory, has quantified the increase in pollution and will present his findings at a community workshop. Before that community meeting local astronomy enthusiasts had organized a public star-gazing party, with the intent partly being to educate local residents about the impacts of light pollution and how to prevent the pollution.

Telluride supports Democrat

TELLURIDE, Colo. — Aspen, Jackson Hole, and Sun Valley/Ketchum have all been big on the fund-raising circuit for politicians. Now, add Telluride to the list.

A fundraiser for Ken Salazar, a U.S. Senate candidate in Colorado who Democrats believe has a good chance of tilting the Senate back to the Democrats, was recently held at Telluride. Among those attending were U.S. senators Jeff Bingaman from New Mexico and Jim Jeffords from Vermont. As well, there was to have been a private concert by singer Judy Collins. Organizers, reported The Telluride Watch, hoped to raise $100,000 or more.

 

Bummer year for ’shrooms

TELLURIDE, Colo. — In the San Juan Mountains the summer passed by dry and extraordinarily cool. The result was "maybe the worst year on record," reports time fungofile Art Goodtimes, whose experience in such matters in Telluride goes back about 20 years. "Devoid of almost all fruiting bodies. Not a pretty fungal picture this year," he reports in The Telluride Watch.

Enrolments down, up

OAK CREEK, Colo. — The story for the last several years in most resort areas of Colorado has been of declining enrolment in public schools even as the general population has grown.

That, for the third straight year is again the case in the Winter Park-Granby-Grand Lake area, called the East Grand School District. But in South Routt, located south of Steamboat Springs, the enrolment increased this year – the first time in six years.

What seems to be happening mainly is that resort areas are filling up with baby boomers, who are mostly past child-bearing age, while the GenXers, who are fewer in number anyway, have chosen to go live in cities during their child-rearing years.

God directed rampage

GRANBY, Colo. — God was more than just the co-pilot for Marvin Heemeyer when he got behind the controls of a bulldozer in Granby on June 4. According to Heemeyer, who mailed a rambling, repetitive recording of his thoughts to a brother beforehand, all this was God’s will.

"God has prepared me to carry this cross," he said. "I believe so, and I’m carrying this cross willingly now." He cited several instances of divine intervention on behalf of his mission.

Heemeyer was apparently a Bible reader, but he thought that Catholics were of a different faith. One of his victims he labelled a Catholic. "I think they are the biggest cowards I’ve ever met," he said. "They have a different idea and read from a different Bible."

The tape, reports the Sky-Hi News, does not answer the question of whether Heemeyer intended to kill anybody. He does not explicitly say that he planned to shoot anybody while attacking Granby, but does say that he would have killed a former business associate from Boulder, Colo., or the man’s family, has the opportunity availed itself.

In the tank, Heemeyer had three semi-automatic rifles. He used the rifle during his rampage to shoot at his nemesis, the owner of a concrete batch plant that offended him, and he also fired at several large propane tanks that, had they exploded, likely would have killed several people in an adjoining senior citizens complex. As well, he had two handguns, including one that he used to kill himself with. Heemeyer’s statements suggest he did not expect to survive after his rampage.

Man fleeing police leaps into unknown

SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — Being chased by police, a 33-year-old man hopped from his Jeep across a rail on Interstate 70, intending to flee on foot. What he couldn’t see in the dark was that it was 40 feet to the ground. The man’s injuries were sufficient that he was flown to metropolitan Denver for treatment.

However, he fared much better than another motorist who was caught in the dark on I-70 some years ago. He had run out of gas on Vail Pass, hitched a ride to a gas station and then back again. After being let off in the opposite lane, he climbed across a barrier thinking there was only snow underfoot. He was wrong. He had climbed the barrier where a creek was located, and fell to his death.