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Mountain News: Backcountry becoming commercialized, mechanized

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Both commercialized recreation and motorized recreation continue to make inroads into the national forests around Jackson Hole. The U.S.

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Both commercialized recreation and motorized recreation continue to make inroads into the national forests around Jackson Hole.

The U.S. Forest Service has agreed to more than double the number of skiers that High Mountain Heli-Skiing can drop in a wilderness study area. Meanwhile, the Forest Service also recently authorized the Jackson Hole Resort to expand the number and score of guided backcountry trips into an area adjacent to Teton Pass.

At issue, says a group fighting the guided backcountry trips, is commercialization of the public lands. "With me, it’s more of a moral issue with the commercial interests crowding in on where the less privileged have skied for years," C. "Stearney" Stearns, a member of a group called Powder to the People, told the Jackson Hole News & Guide. Stearrns had skied at the pass before the ski area opened. He and others want Jackson Hole to stick to areas adjacent to the ski area.

The overriding issue, however, is the general growing use of quasi-backcountry areas close to highways, something that is happening across the West.

"Ten years ago, people could still park at the summit of Teton Pass late on a powder day and wander into the woods to find abundant, untracked snow." notes the Jackson Hole News & Guide. "Today, the parking lot is jammed on weekends and the well known and accessible – even the dangerous – runs are tracked before noon."

Lots of interest in housing

ASPEN, Colo. — The market was at risk this year in Aspen for deed-restricted affordable-housing units. A one-bedroom condominium listed at just below $100,000 drew 67 bidders. A studio unit drew 51 bids. And a three-bedroom, two-bath home priced at $173,000 drew 49 families, reports The Aspen Times.

Aspen also had its second million-dollar affordable housing unit sell during the past year. Several somewhat larger single-family houses are designed for such people as doctors and lawyers. The initial price was not capped, although resale is limited to 4 per cent annual appreciation and to the local workforce.

Price tag on sledding

MINTURN, Colo. — Hard along Interstate 70, just west of Vail, is a place called Meadow Mountain. It once was a downhill ski area, but the Forest Service got the property in a land exchange. And so locals used it for several decades as a sledding hill, with parents taking their small children to the hill on weekends for cheap, outdoor entertainment.

But as Vail’s various suburbs grew, so did use of the hill. A few people became a lot of people, and by the late 1990s accidents had begun occurring, primarily because of sledders sliding into one other.

At first, the Forest Service tried to discourage long, out-of-control slides by erecting plastic fences. But when the agency was accused of negligence after an accident, it banned sledding altogether.

That was a couple of years ago, but now sledding is coming back – at a cost of $16 an hour. The Vail Daily reports that the Forest Service has given a private entrepreneur the right to erect a 275-foot lift, which operates much like a rope tow. Users will be staggered, and attendants will be stationed along the hill to prevent accidents.

A less expensive vision

CANMORE, Alberta — For several years, a sector of the Canmore community wanted to reinvest in its image as a mecca for sports, a reputation established when Canmore was an Olympic venue in 1988.

This vision for a bigger, better mecca included $37 million for a recreational facility that was to include an Olympic-sized ice surface, a swimming pool, running track, and various and sundry other facilities.

But a new mayor and council members elected this fall have a different vision. The council recently voted to spend only $3 million with improvements, creating a second ice surface that caters primarily to the needs of local residents. It’s good enough to accommodate local hockey, speed skating and figure skating leagues.

The prevailing view, as reflected by this vote, is that Canmore is already doing very well based on the appeal of its natural surroundings, including trails. That infrastructure, say proponents, can be maintained at much less expense than a brick-and-mortar recreational complex. As well, a portion of local residents see the town pushing cultural tourism instead of sports tourism, a view encouraged by the Rocky Mountain Outlook, as its well-known neighbour to the west, Banff, has done.

Certainly, Canmore has not shrivelled in population. Now well away from its coal-mining roots, the town has grown rapidly in recent years, as have nearly all towns set among attractive surroundings near ski areas and national parks.

Snowmobile fleet halved

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — Ski town newspapers prominently carried the story of a Dec. 19th collision of a snowmobile on Vail Mountain with teenage ski racer Ashley Stamp of Steamboat Springs, and with good reason. Who hasn’t seen a snowmobile roaring its way up a slope and felt apprehensive?

The Steamboat Pilot reports that well before the tragedy at Vail, managers at the Steamboat Ski Area had undertaken a plan to reduce the potential for a similar collision there. Doug Allen, Steamboat’s vice president of mountain operations, said that Steamboat trimmed its snowmobile fleet almost by half during the last two years.

With the same goal of reducing the potential for a collision, Steamboat has been leaving snowmobiles dispersed around the mountain. When a ski company employee needs a snowmobile to complete a task, he or she can ski to the closest snowmobile to the task, reducing how much the snowmobile is used.

Lift to XX terrain

ASPEN, Colo. — Although it won’t make them any money, the Crown family is installing a 4,300-foot lift into the extremely steep bowl atop Aspen Highlands. Jim Crown, the managing partner in the Aspen Skiing Co., said the company hopes to break ground next summer.

Ropes into the bowl, a place of frequent avalanches before management was extended to it, were dropped two years ago. This new lift will climb 1,800 vertical feet, allowing lap-skiing in the bowl. A ski area planner, Victor Gerdin, said the lift won’t produce more revenue for the company, but it makes some of the best extreme skiing in Colorado accessible to more people.

The future: easy terrain, big homes

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — The future is arriving at Crested Butte. A new fixed-grip lift has opened, but more important is the terrain it is to serve: intermediate runs.

Crested Butte ranks alongside the best in the West when it comes to XX-rated terrain. However, it has too little beginner and intermediate terrain to keep most destination skiers happily occupied for more than a couple of days. As such, the push of the new owners of the ski area, Tim and Diane Mueller, is to expand the amount of lower-level terrain.

Not incidentally, the new Prospector Lift is adjacent to new luxury homes, most of which have already been sold.

Base area developments key

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — Development and redevelopment of base villages at ski resorts from Durango to Mammoth to Sun Valley have topped the news in ski towns across the West during the last year.

Most controversial has been one in Jackson Hole, where a ranch near the base of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort is proposed for hundreds of new homes, some shops, and a golf course. Critics, most of them from the town of Jackson, located 12 miles away, say the new development will compete with Jackson for tourism, perhaps ultimately making Jackson irrelevant. As well, there are concerns this new project, despite a large affordable-housing component, will add more top to Jackson Hole’s already top-heavy economics.

However, in a pre-Christmas vote, the plan cleared the first review by Teton County planning commissioners. The commissioners specified more public benefits in exchange for the density bonus.

At Crested Butte, developers also got a pre-Christmas bonus when the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council gave preliminary approval to a $200 million base area plan. That keeps the project, a mix of new development and redevelopment, on track to break ground in April. The real estate project will give Crested Butte a much larger bed base, the better to accommodate the destination skiers that the resort so badly wants.

The other part of the plan to get destination skiers is to create what amounts to a new ski area, called Snodgrass Mountain. It is to be quite unlike Crested Butte’s existing terrain, instead offering almost exclusively blues and greens. "If there were a ski area operator’s prayer," writes John Norton, former manager of Crested Butte’s ski area, "it might go like this: ‘Please, Lord, let everyone be safe on the mountain, and give us abundant intermediate terrain and snow. Amen.’"

Except for the safety part, that sounds very much like Vail, a mountain chosen specifically because of its vast amounts of intermediate terrain. But Vail has also stumbled along the way. A base area development called LionsHead Mall never quite worked as planned. Portions of that base area, as well as other hotels in Vail, are being razed to make way for bigger and better. Some of the work has already begun in what altogether will total about $1 billion in reinvestment in Vail.

A key component of this planning, which took eight years, is the financing mechanism for the public-sector improvements such as streetscaping. A controversial method called tax-increment financing allows future increased tax collections to be skimmed off the top and used to repay the costs. This takes away money that would otherwise go to the local school district and the county government.

Before that happens, however, an area must be declared "blighted," as specified by Colorado law. In this context, blighted does not mean thick with wind bottles and graffiti, but instead, underperforming economically. Vail got its fair share of ridicule from the outside world, but stuck with the process with little internal dissent.

In Steamboat Springs, a group of property owners want to use a similar process to speed along redevelopment at the base of the ski area, which similar to Vail’s Lionshead Mall, was built in the early 1970s. However, the council is hesitating on pulling the trigger on creating a special district that would ultimately short the county government tax revenues. Town officials want to first come to some peaceable resolution with these other jurisdictions.

Reservoir okay so far

WINTER PARK, Colo. — A proposed reservoir that would help Winter Park ease past some of its worst water woes has survived the first review. The reservoir would cost $8.7 million to build, not including land acquisition, and would hold 540 acre-feet of water.

However, that’s far less than the minimum 8,100 acre-feet of storage that officials believe necessary to accommodate all the development being planned in Winter Park and the Fraser Valley. The water shortages are so severe that town officials think they may have already approved more development than existing water systems can service during drought years.

Bird of a feather…

ASPEN, Colo. — If you’re from Vail, or Jackson Hole, or Park City and go mountain biking or rafting in Utah during May, chances are good that you’ll see somebody that you know.

And if you’re from New York City vacationing at Christmas, chances are good that you’ll be surrounded by other people you know from New York City. Or so reports the New York Times in an article titled, "Where Birds of Paradise Flock Together."

"Affluent New Yorkers tend to be a fashion-conscious group, and despite claiming to want to get away from everything familiar, what they really want is to be at one of the in-crowd vacation spots," explained the newspaper, before going on to list Aspen and Sun Valley, as well as St. Bart’s and Palm Beach.

Continued the newspaper: "Once there among friends, their place in the social pecking order is affirmed and there are so many opportunities to know better the people who can write private school recommendations for your children or invest in your hedge fund."

The newspaper interviewed Jason Binn, the publisher of Aspen Peak, Hamptons, and Gothic magazines, which chronicle the Net Jet set. "New Yorkers are all about six degrees of separation," said Binn, who was planning a New Year’s Eve bash in Aspen with Manhattan socialite Denise Rich. "They say they love adventure, but they pretty much stick to the same places year round."

Slide warnings posted

PARK CITY, B.C. — Last February a snowshoer was killed by an avalanche in a canyon adjacent to Park City. To reduce the chances of such a thing happening again, town officials have posed signs at popular trailheads that lead to risky slopes.

Charlie Sturgis, the manager of a store selling outdoor goods, told The Park Record that the effort to remind people to be aware of hazardous conditions is a good thing to do. "Even after 30 years of dealing with the public in retail, you can’t give them too much information, he said.

No decision yet on wolves

EAGLE, Colo. — About 60 years after government agents killed the last wolves in Colorado, they are returning. A wolf that had been seen six months before in Yellowstone was killed in traffic on Interstate 70 last June, and wildlife biologists says it’s likely yet more wolves will trot south into Colorado in future years.

As for packs in Colorado? That could take decades , says Ed Bangs, the Montana-based leader of the Gray Wolf Recovery Team.

"These lone wolves could show up for decades before you get a male and female show up who like each other and breed and have pups," says Bangs. "We have had lone wolves even in Kansas and Missouri, as well as Utah, Oregon, and Washington. But it’s a big difference talking about when we think a pack will show up in Colorado. It could be decades – or it could be next year. You never know, but I’m betting on the longer time frame."

While gray wolves transplanted a decade ago are doing well in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, the subspecies transplanted to the Arizona-New Mexico border are not doing nearly as well.

A recovery team has talked about transplanting that subspecies, called Mexican wolves, somewhere in Colorado south of I-70 during the next two or three years. However, recovery team members said mid-December news that suggested the decision has been made was premature, if not wrong. "They may very well be, but that decision hasn’t been made yet," said Michael Robinson of the Center of Biological Diversity.

New ski area in farm land?

WINDSOR, Colo. — You certainly wouldn’t call Windsor a mountain town. Located about an hour’s drive north of Denver and 20 miles east of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, this is a farming country. Or at least it used to be.

Lately, it has become thick with real estate developments, and one of the developers wants to create a ski area on a river bluff, using the vertical relief of 250 feet.

This would not be the first ski area in Windsor, which is also home to a Kodak plant. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a ski area called Sharkstooth was operated. It never got more than about 10,000 skier days a year, and only that by offering sliding under lights. The closest big ski areas in Colorado are located about a two-hour drive away.

That ski area, while always marginal and constantly vulnerable to heart waves, was ultimately a victim of demographics. After the bulge of baby boomers stopped skiing as frequently the ski industry flattened through the 1990s as the generation X, a much smaller group, came of age.

But since 2000, the industry has been growing again as a new generation, the echo boom or Gen Y, comes of age. The growth period is expected to continue another 10 to 15 years.

However, demographers also point out that ski areas riding this wave of a new population bulge will necessarily look more colourful. A much higher percentage of this age cohort are Latino, black, and Oriental.

Forest Service backs off

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The U.S. Forest Service has backed away from its proposed requirement that owners leash their dogs when hiking on the first mile of a popular trail in Jackson Hole.

The district ranger, Nancy Hall, said that because the public has such few places where dogs can run free, dog owners will only be required to carry leashes with them. Only if the dogs will not respond to voice commands must they be used.

However, the Forest Service is staying the course on requiring leashes on several other local hiking trails that are adjacent to wildlife reserves, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

More of the same

DILLON, Colo. — Two years ago Arapahoe Basin was such an old-fashioned ski areas it lacked snowmaking. It now has snowmaking, and in many other ways the ski area managers want to make it more like Vail, Aspen, and other ski areas.

To that end, they have asked Summit County government to reserve the option for a members-only club on private land within the ski area, mimicking similar members-only affairs at other ski areas in Colorado, including Aspen, Vail, Beaver Creek, and Winter Park.

Jim Gentling, general manager, told local planning commissioners he could also foresee a mid-mountain restaurant, a corporate retreat, a home for the owners (currently Dundee Realty), and a renewable energy source.

Although opened in 1946, placing it only behind Aspen, Winter Park, and Monarch among Colorado’s continuously operated ski areas, A-Basin lost ground as new ski areas opened at generally lower and less windy elevations and often with real estate as an ancillary.