CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — PooFest is returning for a second year at Crested Butte, a dog-friendly town where a good many dog owners poo-poo the idea of cleaning up after their dogs through winter. With the snow now melting, those omissions are now becoming apparent.
Last year, 50 people turned out for PooFest and collected 875 pounds of dog-poop from streets, sidewalks, and yards. People picking puppy poop this year will get T-shirts – in a brown-and-white design, notes the Crested Butte News.
50 miles, a world of difference
CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — What a difference in weather just 50 miles can make! That difference has been evident this winter is snowfall amounts in Colorado.
The southern storm track that drenched Los Angeles also left the Crested Butte with a snowpack that in late March sat at 132 per cent of average. But northeast 50 to 75 miles, as the crow flies, the Vail area was only at 83 per cent of average. A little farther north, the Steamboat Springs area was at 80 per cent.
It is undeniably a big snow year for Crested Butte, Telluride, and Durango – leading to some talk about the "end" of the drought. Climatologists warn against such prattle. One year of poor snow does not create an extended drought, nor does one good year of snow end that drought.
Buildings starting to green up
DURANGO, Colo. — The beginnings of so-called "green" building are being noted in Durango. There, a clustered 10-home project is planned that will use both passive and active solar energy.
Meanwhile, city officials are informally pushing green building practices by promoting several forums on that topic, and they may yet formally incorporate green building practices into city codes.
But doesn’t green building make housing unaffordable for working stiffs? No, not really, reports the Durango Telegraph. The newspaper explains that "green" homes can be built for as low as $90 a square foot. The higher up-front costs can be recouped within three to five years. Within 30 years, given current energy costs, the owner of a 1,250-square-foot house can save $30,000 to $80,000.
Green building involves a different mind set, says the City of Durango’s Linda Lewis, "Instead of thinking ‘how big a house can we get for our money?’ people need to think in terms of ‘How sustainable of a house can we get for our money?’"
Hiking trails tied to caribou decline
BANFF, Alberta — The population of woodland caribou in Banff and Jasper national parks has been declining precipitously. In Jasper, the population has declined by roughly half in the last 30 years. Banff’s population has dropped from 20 to 30 individuals down to three to five.
What’s going on? Lots of theories, but researchers now say that part of the problem may be the profusion of hiking trails in the park. Studies suggest that the caribou tend to skirt places, including trails, where there are lots of people.
But another theory, reports the Rocky Mountain Outlook, is that there are too many wolves. A sportsman at a recent meeting called for the wolves to be culled. However, environmental groups think that the human paths and roads that allow wolves easier passage are the base problem.
Economic elitism?
KETCHUM, Idaho — Is the backlash against Wal-Mart comparable to racism and economic elitism? That’s the argument of David Reinhard. "Wal-Martism – you can almost hear the ‘There goes the neighborhood’ cries of yesteryear," he writes in the Idaho Mountain Express.
He sees the protests against Wal-Mart as constituting economic elitism. "Why deny low-income folks a chance to shop and save?" he says. "Saving $500 a year in grocery costs alone may not seem like a lot to some, but it’s vital to many others."
He also argues that Wal-Mart has been unfairly castigated for its wages and benefits package.
Winter almost toasty
FRASER, Colo. — It has been another warm winter. The temperature at Fraser, once called the Icebox of the Nation, twice dropped to 18 below zero, but that’s a far cry from the 30 below that used to be almost a nightly occurrence.
And with these warmer temperatures, the bark beetles that have been terrorizing local forests have escaped the death sentence for yet another year, reports the Winter Park Manifest. The beetles have killed up to 90 per cent of trees in some aging, more decadent forests. Foresters figure extended 30-below weather is needed to quell the beetles.
This is the hardest hit area of Colorado in terms of bark beetles in the current epidemic, and some foresters are talking up the potential for large forest fires.
Gay scene pretty slender
SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — When Lindsey Arnold left Miami’s South Beach and moved to Breckenridge, she thought she was in lesbian heaven. After all, she observed, the women in Summit County dressed much like lesbians in Florida.
Wrong. In fact, she has found no other lesbians her age. "I really think it’s just me," she said, describing the 20- to 32-year-old crowd.
"In a way, that’s OK. I didn’t move out here to be gay," she told the Summit Daily News. "I moved out here to go snowboarding." However, she sheepishly admits to spending more time on the Internet looking for dates.
The newspaper turned up quite a few gay people in Summit County, including couples with children, but not the sort of social scene found in Denver and other cities. Those who did identify themselves said it’s much easier to blend in when in Denver.
Summit County does have a chapter of Parents, Friends, and Families of Lesbians and Gays, which has existed for 11 years. Nearby Leadville, a bedroom community for both Summit County and the Vail Valley, also has an organization called Chicks in the Sticks, which holds potluck dinner and other activities.
The male gays in Summit County also constitute a relatively small group, but are more visible than the female gays. "The boys have a bigger scene, but there’s a bigger guy scene whether it’s New York, Summit County, or L.A.," one woman told the Daily News. "They’re more social,"
Just a little bit more
PARK CITY, Utah — It’s called the "just enough" plea. Developers, ski area operators, and often city officials say they need "just enough" skier days, density, or you name it, to achieve some economy of scale and hence economic sustainability.
That’s the story at The Canyons, where a conglomerate that includes the American Skiing Company, which both operates the ski area and develops real estate, says it needs to build just a little more real estate in order to gain the money to create a golf course. That golf course, in turn, is necessary in order to make The Canyons into a four-season resort. Neighbours of the condominium complex adjacent to the proposed new real estate project are reported by The Park Record to be upset.
Real estate markets torrid
VAIL, Colo. — It’s another barn-burner year in the Vail-area real estate scene. Sales during February were up 20 per cent compared to last year despite a depleted inventory.
To keep this outsized rally going, realty agents have resorted to distributing handbills to households soliciting properties. Much of the action is in the lower end, below $500,000, although one condominium fetched $5.4 million, reports the Vail Daily.
In the Aspen market, much the same trend was reported, with sales for the first two months of the year up 28 per cent compared to last year. Many sales were in the range of $1,000 per square foot.
"I don’t see anything to derail it," Ed Zasacky, a realty agent, told The Aspen Times. Another agent said that off-season this year should be more active than usual.
Refund with interest?
JACKSON, Wyo. — Yet comes another example of how the Internet has changed our lives. Police in Jackson recently came across a wallet that had been squirreled away among drug bust paraphernalia in the evidence locker since the 1980s. The wallet had $177 in bills, but no identifying information other than a Social Security card. Now, with the aid of the Internet, police easily traced the owner to Indiana, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide. The woman had lost the wallet while on a trip to Yellowstone but had not bothered to report the loss.
Drug agents want more
DURANGO, Colo. — Drug-control agents in Durango are trying to say that with increased police presence in Colorado’s Front Range, drug traffickers have moved operations to Durango. The evidence for that argument? An article in the Durango Telegraph had no such evidence, save for the testimony of the drug agents themselves who, of course, seem to think they need more money, based on how successfully they’ve been in arresting people.
It’s a familiar circular argument from the foot soldiers in the already well-funded War on Drugs. While previous reports have exposed the growing manufacture of methamphetamines, the full nature of the illicit drug trafficking was not disclosed.
AIDS on rise
I-70 CORRIDOR, Colo. — Another story has come out about the increasing numbers of HIV infections and AIDS cases in the ski resort counties along the Interstate 70 corridor. What exactly this means, however, remains unclear.
Mirroring somewhat earlier stories in newspapers in Summit County and Vail, the Rocky Mountain News reported that the number of HIV and AIDS cases in the resort counties from Breckenridge to Vail to Aspen has spiked in the last four years. However, it could be that more testing is being done.
Even so, these resort counties do have a disproportionate number of AIDS cases, as does La Plata County, where Durango is located, when compared to other, more rural areas. Why? That’s not clear. Health care officials have implicated the permissive, party-type lifestyle of ski resorts but without any good hard evidence being cited.
Then again, increased drug use, particularly because of methamphetamines, seems to be part of the regional story, although it’s not clear whether that’s the story in the resort communities.
Instead of homosexual sex, heterosexual transmission has now become more common. And again, mirroring national trends, a greater number of women are being infected by HIV. It was also reported that a greater number of Latinos have HIV, although it’s not clear whether this national statistic has any relevance to the resort communities, where most Latinos are recent immigrants.
Are people with AIDS moving from elsewhere into ski counties? Or are HIV carriers leaving ski counties to be near better health care facilities? Take your pick. There are a lot of theories, but relevant facts are scarce.
New lodge boosts skier totals
SUN VALLEY, Idaho — Environmentalists have long accused the ski industry of making skiing all about real estate. Ski industry executives don’t totally deny the accusation.
At Sun Valley, there’s new evidence in support of that proposition. A new facility called Carol’s Dollar Mountain Lodge opened in December, offering a luxurious dining room, plus various skier support facilities. The facility is at the base of the historic beginners’ ski area at Sun Valley, the first destination ski resort in the West.
And the numbers please? Ah, yes. Skier days at this beginners’ area increased 43 per cent this year.
Sun Valley plans more changes: additional snowmaking plus a significant upgrade of the uphill lift and gondola regime during the coming decade, reports the Idaho Mountain Express.
Telluride tsunami relief continues
TELLURIDE, Colo. — The contributions from ski towns to tsunami relief efforts continues even yet. In Telluride, a public-spirited foundation created a relief fund that has raised $183,000. After careful research, the group allocated the money to several different groups, including Room to Read, which is rebuilding schools in Sri Lanka, and Project Concern, which is helping reconstruct the infrastructure of West Aceh, Indonesia. An anonymous donor gave $50,000 to get the fund-raising in Telluride started, reports The Telluride Watch.
