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Mountain News: Armstrong’s presence felt

LEADVILLE, Colo. – Lance Armstrong made his name world-known on skinny tires, not fat ones.

LEADVILLE, Colo. – Lance Armstrong made his name world-known on skinny tires, not fat ones. Still, there is only one Lance Armstrong, and so the atmosphere this year at the Leadville 100 — a fat tire race — was electrified with Armstrong competing.

The course demands Herculean efforts. As the name suggests, it covers 100 miles, with 14,000 feet of climbing, topping out at 12,600 feet.

As well, there can be special challenges peculiar to Leadville, a one-time mining town set to resume its mining ways in another year or two. “Lycra will never replace denim as the fabric of choice,” observes the Gunnison Country Times in its report of the race.

For example, one rider said he had to “yoo-hoo” to get past an oblivious woman driving a pickup truck down the middle of the road, a cigarette dangling out of the window. That same racer was chased by dogs down a hill near the finish.

Then there was Armstrong. One competitor, Crested Butte’s Ethan Passant, with outstanding accomplishments in long distances in his own right, found himself in an unusual position at one point. “I looked back and said, ‘Holy $***, Lance Armstrong is on my wheel, drafting off of me,’” he said.

It came down to Armstrong and David Wiens, a Gunnison resident who had previously won the race five times — all after supposedly retiring from racing.

In the end, Armstrong conceded the race, and Wiens eased away to a win, despite a flattening rear tire that held only 10 pounds per square inch of air as he squished across the finish line in a record 6 hours and 45 minutes.

Beyond this obvious drama at the front of the pack, the Times’s correspondent, editor Chris Dickey, also muses about the also-rans. Such as how on earth did the guy from flat-as-pancakes Kansas train for a race like this?

Riding getting expensive

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Blowing through a stop sign while riding a bicycle is costing riders money this summer in Jackson. The local police department has ramped up enforcement of the laws. The Jackson Hole News & Guide says 40 per cent of cases in traffic court on a recent day were riders charged with failure to stop at stop signs.

“The warnings weren’t working,” said Alan Johnson, a police officer, who is leading the charge. The fine is $100, plus $35 tuition for an eight-hour traffic school.

Johnson, who is a cyclist himself, says he gives riders the benefit of a doubt. “If somebody gives a worthwhile attempt to stop and look both ways, they’re good,” he said. “If they don’t even come close to stopping and they just look around and go, they’ll get a ticket.”

The newspaper says Jackson Hole has considerable annoyance with bicycle riders. Four of five people in a recent poll said they found riders more aggravating than either mosquitoes or the smoke from forest fires. Bicycle riders, of course, have their own version of what’s wrong with the world.

 

Yellowstone Club settles

BIG SKY, Mont. – A settlement has been reached in the lawsuit filed between former bicycle racing star Greg LeMond and Timothy Blixseth, the owner of the ultra-elite Yellowstone Club, a private ski area.

The settlement requires Blixseth pay LeMond and his partners $39.5 million. They had been ousted from the club, where building lots cost upwards of $10 million.

LeMond and his partners had accused Blixseth of diverting more than $420 million of company money into personal bank accounts and unrelated companies, using it to finance a lavish lifestyle, including a 2-seat Gulfstream corporate jet for $44 million, a Hawker 600 jet, two Rolls-Royce Phantoms, and three Land Rovers.

The Times says the agreement coincides with settlement of the contentious divorce between Blixseth and Edra Blixseth, who now controls the club.

 

McCain drops in

ASPEN, Colo. – John McCain dropped into the Vail and Aspen areas for a day last week.

In the Lake Creek Valley near Vail, McCain scooped up $300,000 from people at a luncheon. Local Republicans told the Vail Daily they had rustled up $3 million for McCain in three weeks.

McCain also saw an old roommate, of sorts. Tom Kirk, a Vail resident, was a prisoner of war alongside McCain at the so-called “Hanoi Hilton.” He said it was “thrilling and marvelous” to see his old friend.

Bouncing into the next valley, McCain passed the hat again at a $1,000 a plate fundraiser in Aspen. Later, McCain and his wife, Cindy McCain, made plans to spend the money, strolling on a 53-acre ranch for a television commercial.

Although it’s probably been a half-century, maybe longer, since Pitkin County voted for a Republican for president, McCain has been there five times in the last four years. Just a year ago, during his last visit to Aspen, it appeared that his presidential aspirations were dashed.

This year, he spent 70 minutes talking before 800 people, answering questions about Iraq, energy and his rapprochement with Christian evangelicals.

There were smiles and jokes. Some were intended, but The Aspen Times said one guffaw from the crowd was not. At one point McCain complained about $3.75 per gallon gasoline. It’s $5 per gallon in Aspen.

McCain also met privately for 90 minutes with another Aspen visitor, T. Boone Pickens. A billionaire oilman, Pickens has made headlines this year in calling for ramping up renewable energy as a way of cutting oil imports. Those imports currently cost U.S. consumers $700 billion annually in what Pickens calls the “largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.”

Pickens hopes to tap the energy of a wind corridor that extends from West Texas to Canada that he says could supply at least 20 per cent of America’s energy needs.

In his hour-long talk at Aspen, Pickens was “full of self-deprecating humor, rampant enthusiasm, a dozen stories, a wandering attention span and a Texas twang,” said the Times. Afterward, people with questions, cameras and energy ideas of their own mobbed Pickens.

Four years ago, Pickens was the moneybags behind the Swift Boaters campaign smear of John Kerry. Kerry, meanwhile, has had his problems in Idaho, where he and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a home in Ketchum, at the foot of Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.

The Idaho Mountain Express says the couple were denied permission for plans to tinker with the Big Wood River that adjoins their property. Consultants had said they worried about a logjam in the river along the property.

 

Forest fires consuming money

DURANGO, Colo. – The U.S. Forest Service has already burned through its firefighting budget for the year, putting the squeeze on local operations. For the Durango-Silverton area, that means $800,000 has been trimmed from the budget, reports the Durango Telegraph.

In California, the Los Angeles Times recently took a hard look at the escalating cost of fighting fires, which last year cost the Forest Service $1.37 billion — more than four times the cost of a decade before.

The fires are a result of drought and past policies that stamped out all fires, delaying the inevitable. The result is fires that every year linger more persistently, the newspaper says. Stephen J. Pyne, the nation’s preeminent fire historian, calls it “ecological insurgency.”

Also increasing costs of firefighting is the steady encroachment of homes into forested areas.

The Times examined a fire last year near Santa Barbara, Calif., that burned for nearly three months. In that time the Forest Service spent $140 million. Fighting fires has become big business, often leaving a large trail of money in local stores. Roughly 60 per cent of the Forest Service’s wildfire expenditures last year went to the private sector.

“Fire is becoming a kind of cash crop,” said Preston Wright, 50, a Nevada rancher. “When the firefighters show up, there are dollars along with them.”

For example, one firm, called For Stars Catering, grossed $4.7 million from the California fire last year. Fire crews scrubbed down in 12-stall shower trailers that cost $2,100 a day. A $400-an-hour mobile laundry washed the sooty clothes of firefighters.

Fire, says the newspaper, is chewing through so much Forest Service money that the U.S. Congress is considering a separate federal account to cover the cost of catastrophic blazes.

 

Business group backing flights

KETCHUM, Idaho – Tourism leaders in Ketchum and Sun Valley are hoping to steel themselves from a downturn in the airline industry. A business group called Fly Sun Valley Alliance is hoping to raise $150,000 to $200,000 to post revenue guarantees for flights from Los Angeles.

Such revenue guarantees are common for such direct flights to ski-valley airports. The alliance members, reports the Idaho Mountain Express, also hope to get an Idaho law revised that will allow them to pass a local sales tax to permanently provide a revenue source for revenue guarantees. Steamboat, Crested Butte, and Telluride already have such dedicated revenue sources.

 

Sugar daddy hopes to stay out of jail

BEAVER CREEK, Colo. – Alberto Vilar is scheduled to go to trial in September on charges that he defrauded clients. But unlike a procession of other part-time Beaver Creek residents in recent years who have been imprisoned for looting their businesses for lavish personal lifestyles, the accusations against Vilar are of a different sort.

Federal prosecutors say he took money from investors and plowed at least part of the money into non-profits, mostly to further the performing arts. Above all, he loved opera and symphony music.

Altogether, Vilar gave $200 million to various non-profits around the world, according to published reports. More than $10 million of that was to venues in Vail and Beaver Creek. A princely concert hall at the latter resort, where Vilar also had a 16,000-square-foot house, bears the name the Vilar Center.

A Cuban immigrant, Vilar had started a firm in 1979 called Amerindo Investment Advisors. Early on he invested in Microsoft and Cisco and other high-tech ventures. Before the tech bubble burst, he was asked his opinion of future prospects. It was, he said, just the first inning.

He was wrong, of course. Soon, he was unable to make good on many of his broad commitments, including several in Vail and Beaver Creek.

The Vail-area community’s relationship with Vilar is, says correspondent James Paton of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, “a complicated topic.” In other words, it’s a case of “thank you, but …”

“Clearly, he was driven by ego and his desire to be known, which is human nature,” said Oscar Tang, one of Vail’s most prominent property owners and cultural benefactors.

“He clearly had a need to be liked,” said Harry Frampton, the managing partner in East West Partners and president of the Vail Valley Foundation.

Vail cultural programmers were left hanging when, after originally agreeing to underwrite a summer residency by the New York Philharmonic, Vilar came up short in 2002. He also reneged on his commitment to help refurbish the Ford Amphitheater, Vail’s summer outdoor performing arts centre.

Tony O’Rourke, director of the Beaver Creek Resort Co., said the only thing he knows Vilar is guilty of is “being addicted to philanthropy.” Beyond that, he said, “justice will have to run its course.”

Several other prominent Beaver Creek residents with strong connections to the corporate world have ended up in federal prisons during recent years, most notably Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco and Adelphia founder John Rigas and his son Timothy. The elder Rigas is scheduled to be released from prison in 2017. If still alive, he will be 92.

 

What goes up must come down

BANFF, Alberta – Melissa Lafreniere is a professor from Ontario. Among her specialties is the effect of climate change on the crysophere, the world’s places of snow and ice. She has conducted research in the Arctic, but this summer was in the Canadian Rockies south of Banff, on Robertson Glacier.

Lafreniere told the Rocky Mountain Outlook she was trying to understand how much nutrient gets deposited by snow and rain, and to determine how much is natural and how much is caused by humans, a process called anthropogenic.

She was part of a larger team, including scientists from Montana State University, in Bozeman, studying how the changing climate is impacting glaciers beyond the obvious recessions of ice.

What Lafreniere has come to understand more thoroughly through the years is how completely the fingerprints of people can be found, even in seemingly remote and pristine places.

“Nothing is pristine anymore — not in the high alpine, not in the high Arctic,” she told the Outlook. “What goes up must come down,” she added, referring to pollution released into the sky.

 

Viagra helping athletes

BEIJING, China – It turns out that Viagra is a multi-tasking drug. In addition to its best-known purpose, Viagra is used by athletes who have to perform at high elevations. That’s because it can open airways.

“At 10,900 or even 7,000 feet, Viagra gives you a sea-level vo2 max,” said Kenneth Rundell, referring to maximum aerobic capacity, in an interview with the New York Times. The newspaper noted that cyclists on the Tour de France have been using Viagra to get more air into their lungs.

Rundell, who directs respiratory research and the human physiology laboratory at Marywood University in Scranton, Pa., is investigating whether Viagra can also be used to alleviate the effects of air pollution. Studies in animals indicate that air pollution can impede air flow in the lungs by causing pulmonary hypertension, which is high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs.

The reason the Times was wondering about all this, of course, is Beijing’s infamous air pollution — although, for various reasons, the pollution has temporarily disappeared.

 

Hops grown at elevation

TAOS, N.M. – With its mountainous background, Denver would likely be the first guess of many people if asked to name the state capitol with the highest elevation. It is, after all, the Mile High City.

In fact, Wyoming’s state capitol in Cheyenne is higher, and highest of all is the elevation of Santa Fe, the capitol city of New Mexico, which is 6,989 feet. Only a few feet lower is nearby Taos, which now has several farmers who are growing hops, the substance that gives beer its pleasantly bitter taste.

Organic farmers Todd Bates and Steve Johnson have bred wild varieties of hops. The climate of northern New Mexico’s higher elevations may be an issue, but the growers have high hopes.

“They said that they wouldn’t grow organically at altitude,” Bates told The Taos News. “But anywhere apples grow, hops grow. And we’ve got some pretty good organic apples around here.”

 

Hope springs eternal for tomatoes

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Is the globe warming? One clear guide is whether people in ski towns can begin growing tomatoes outdoors with some expectation that there will be fruit, so to speak, for their labours.

In Vail, at 8,200 feet, the results have been rather marginal for growers, except for the small, cherry tomatoes called Sweet 100s, reports Norma Broten, a 35-year resident.

Jackson Hole is farther north, but 2,000 feet lower. There, hopes run higher. Bob Lenz, a city councilman and 33-year resident, says last year he got four or five medium-sized tomatoes that ripened to red before frost arrived. This year, if the weather holds another couple of weeks, he may need a bushel basket.

 

Resistant is futile

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – As happened in Vail and Aspen before them, people in Crested Butte this summer are learning the difference between “wildlife-resistant” trash containers and those that are “wildlife-proof.”

The short answer is that it takes a lot of steel to secure trash from the five bears that are believed to be causing all the ruckus. It helps, however, if the lids are latched shut.

The so-called Bear Smart trash bins have been ripped open by hungry bears. “The key word is ‘resistant,’” said Tom Martin, the police chief, speaking of the trash containers.

But at nearby Mt. Crested Butte, even heavy metal hasn’t entirely succeeded in preventing the more clever and powerful of the bears determined to get into dumpsters, officials tell the Crested Butte News.