STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – Deep in the heat of summer,
the marketing team for the Intrawest ski resorts is at work in Steamboat
Springs, plotting out how to confront a weak economy and rising oil prices that
have made flying more expensive.
One plan being rolled out to flights to and from Steamboat is a
promotion in which kids fly free, and so do bags.
“Our mechanism is basically to be giving people a card
pre-charged with that amount of money to take care of their bags at check-in,”
Andy Wirth, Intrawest’s vice president for marketing, told The Steamboat Pilot
& Today. “American Express has given us a very smooth mechanism for this.”
If the deal works well during the first 45 to 60 days of
operation, the baggage promotion could expand to other Intrawest resorts, Wirth
said.
“The game’s won or lost in spring or summer,” Wirth told the
newspaper. “Even though it’s 85 degrees outside, we’ve very much in the heat of
battle for the dead of winter.”
Ski areas decry visa cap
LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Ski area operators are describing
labor issues with the sort of language usually described for drought.
The specific source of anxiety, reports the
Reno
Gazette-Journal
, is the cap on H-2B visas,
which was reached last October. Ski resorts recently learned that the U.S.
government will reject all additional applications unless Congress removes the
quota.
“It’s kind of a nightmare for us,” Ed Youmans, general manager
of Diamond Peak, a ski resort at Incline Village.
Bob Roberts, executive director of the California Ski Industry
Association, said the cap could bar 200 of the 1,500 to 2,000 foreign workers
at California resorts. As well, the cap affects snowmaking experts, ski
patrollers, and food-and- beverage workers.
A reason for surge in tourism
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Gas prices reached record highs in
June. Yet at Yellowstone, the quintessential drive-by national park, visitation
also reached a record high. What’s going on?
Jonathan Schechter, an economics columnist in the
Jackson
Hole News & Guide
, said there may be an
easy explanation for this seeming anomaly: international visitors. Because park
officials don’t track the nationalities of visitors, there’s no way to know for
sure, he says, but anecdotal evidence points firmly toward that as an
explanation.
Since 2004, there has been an almost perfect correlation
between the value of the Euro, which has gone up 10 per cent, and park
visitation. As well, the fastest growing mode of visitor transportation into
Yellowstone during that same time was on bus, the choice of many foreign
tourists. Last month, Yellowstone saw an almost equal increase in those
visiting via bus as in those arriving by car, a singular event in recent
history.
Merchants decamp from REIT
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. – Mammoth Lakes is chattering
anxiously about the emptying out of a commercial complex called the Village at
Mammoth. “We’ve got two ghost towns now,” said Rusty Gregory, the chief
executive of the ski area at Mammoth. He was referring to the complex, and also
to Bodie, the ghost town in nearby Death Valley.
The complex was purchased by CNL Lifestyle Properties for $23.5
million, said Mr. Gregory, although Intrawest, which owns the ski operations,
figures the property is worth $12 million to $15 million. In his telling of the
story (as recounted by The Sheet), CNL has set rates that are unacceptable.
Sources tell Mountain Town News that CNL refused for months to return phone
calls from tenants in the 58,000-square-foot complex.
The feeling in Mammoth seems to be that this is an example of
the dangers of a real estate investment trust becoming a dominant player. There
is also some speculation that CNL hopes to be rid of the tenants, who are
mostly homegrown, and replace them with high-end chains, such as might be found
on Rodeo Drive.
Gregory said that Mammoth Mountain is feeling something less
than powerful after the skier count dropped 35 to 40 per cent below its record
of 1.6 million. All this comes as Mammoth gets ready to finalize air service,
with one flight per day from Los Angeles beginning in December.
Sun Valley event draws ‘big iron’
HAILEY, Idaho – During the recent Allen & Co.
conference of corporate chieftains at nearby Sun Valley, the airport
down-valley at Hailey was full of what pilots call “big iron.” Rick Baird,
airport manager, told the Idaho Mountain Express that there were 90 corporate
jets, and some had to park at other airports in Idaho.
The jets, said Baird, are bigger than ever. More than half were
the Bombardier Global Express ($45 million each when new) and the Gulfstream V
or 500 series (new at between $39 million to $450 million each).
Total value of the VIP “big iron” was estimated at $2 billion.
For a Global Express plane, it would cost $48,000 to fill ’er
up at the prices in Hailey of jet fuel, $7.44 per gallon.
Publisher calls for balanced economy
TELLURIDE, Colo. – By normal means of travel —
driving a car — there is only one way in and out of Telluride for much of
the year. It’s in a box-end canyon, beautiful and removed in a sense from the
outside world. Seth Cagin, who publishes
The Telluride Watch
, says that many who moved there do so precisely to
get away from the real world.
“But there’s nothing like a recession to remind us that we are
not immune from the world’s folly, and it’s a fantasy to imagine that we are
not ‘part of the problem,’” he says.
Cagin arcs his thinking to what is, for him, a familiar
subject: economic sustainability. He argues that Telluride has become too
dependent on the real estate economy. He calls for boosting the tourism
economy. Some within Telluride, he charges, oppose tourism growth and perhaps
prefer shrinkage.
“Surely by now it is obvious to everyone who works for a
living, and even to a bunch of the people rich enough that they don’t have to
work for a living, that we have allowed our economy to become dangerously
unbalanced. Buying and selling real estate is not enough to sustain us,” he
writes.
“Yet there has been so much resistance from segments of our
community to developing the only other sector of our economy that we’ve got,
tourism, that we almost don’t have any, and what little we’ve got is
threatened,” he continues.
“The honest and, I think, inarguable truth is we’ve utterly
failed to develop a sustainable local economy to buttress us when the real
estate bubble that has sustained us so comfortably inevitably pops. Because all
bubbles pop eventually.”
There are a good many people in Telluride, he says, who seem to
quietly harbour hopes for Telluride to slink back to quieter times, when it was
a shell of its former glory as a mining town.
Location-neutral firms cultivated
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – The phrase “location-neutral
business” has been heard often during the last several years in Steamboat
Springs. Local economic development officials think that such businesses are
already important there, stabilizing and rounding out the economy.
Noreen Moore, business resource director of the Routt County
Economic Development Cooperative, supervised a 2006 study that found three
major types of location-neutral businesses: 1) those that could have started
anywhere but chose Steamboat; 2) employees who work for a company outside the
area; and 3) people who sell their services to clients out of the area.
People come to Steamboat because of the lifestyle, she
explained to the Steamboat Pilot & Today. “They’ve shopped comparable
towns, and then they’ve picked us, because we are a ‘real town.’”
There are, of course, gradients in this. John Peretz owns a
company called Fireball Marketing. He tells the Pilot that only 10 per cent of
his business comes from Routt County. Amy Gregorich, who runs a firm called
Rock Gurl Website Consulting out of her home, has mostly local clients.
David Moon, the principal at KittyHawk Partners, an aerospace
consulting firm, said location-neutral businesses in Steamboat Springs might
benefit from an office park with shared facilities.
Real estate market tanks
DRIGGS, Idaho – While the real estate market in Jackson
Hole is holding up in value, if not sales volume, that’s not the case on the
west side of the Teton Range in Idaho. There, in Teton Valley, the market has
cooled, with a few scattered projects potentially suspending sales efforts.
Idaho’s Teton Valley can be called the poor man’s Jackson Hole.
High-end real estate buyers in Jackson Hole normally pay cash. But they usually
need financing in Teton Valley’s fast emerging resort real estate market.
There is a lot of inventory. A place of broad meadows, the
valley was run by officials who vehemently disliked planning procedures that
would limit the rights of private property for sales and development. As a
result, explains the Jackson Hole News & Guide, 9,000 housing units have
been authorized.
“Certainly the national economy is playing a factor, but that
is not the whole story,” said Jeff Klausmann, a project manager for a company,
Intermountain Aquatics, in Driggs. Because the broader story, he said, is that
the market currently has too much supply for the demand.
Jeff Russell, developer of J Lazy H, said Teton Valley could be
looking at 20 to 30 years before demand catches up with supply. He predicts
sales will worsen even more before recovery begins.
Others, however, argue that if Teton Valley sales are sluggish,
it’s worse elsewhere. Elsewhere was not defined.
Fire tax considered
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California is talking about ways to
tax people in rural areas for the cost of fighting wildfires. The cost is huge,
about $950 million in the last year. The state has a budget deficit of more
than $17 billion, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Christine Kehoe, a state legislator from San Diego, tells the
newspaper that frenzied building in rural areas increases the burden on state
firefighters to defend homes and property. Defending homes substantially
increases the cost of firefighting. She says that people who choose to live in
exurban, rural areas must shoulder more of the firefighting costs.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed an insurance surcharge
on all property taxes. But the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office says the
tax would be unfair to people who don’t live in rural, exurban areas. It
instead wants the tax levied only in areas protected by the state’s
firefighting agency, called CalFire.
The issue again highlights the long-simmering dispute about rights
and responsibilities of development — not just in California, but across
the mountainous West. The Journal points out that local governments that
approve the development bear little fiscal consequences for the cost of
fighting fires.
“Local land-use approvals for residential development in the
backcountry should be tied to the future cost of firefighting,” says Kehoe, the
legislator. “If they want to approve a new development, they should be required
to plan for ongoing fire prevention; otherwise, this problem will continue
without interruption.”
Revelstoke to get bigger, taller
REVELSTOKE, B.C. – Revelstoke Mountain Resort is gearing
up for its second year of operations as a major resort. This coming season, the
ski area will have 5,620 feet of lift-served skiing, with a top elevation of
7,300 feet. The gondola will be extended to the base village, and a new
high-speed quad chairlift will be ready for operation. Resort officials tell
the Revelstoke Times Review that it will be the only resort in the world that
offers lift-skiing, cat-skiing and heli-skiing from the village base.
Aspen drilling for subterranean heat
ASPEN, Colo. – You go deep enough underground, even in
places blanketed by snow half the year, and the rocks get hot. The question is
how near the surface. In Aspen, there is at least anecdotal evidence to suggest
the heat can be found relatively close to the surface.
Why this matters is that Aspen dearly would love to further
shrink its carbon footprint. The community heats its homes and businesses
primarily by burning natural gas. Natural gas releases half the carbon dioxide
for a given amount of energy as compared to coal, but that’s still a large
carbon footprint.
Anecdotal evidence of underground heat and water is found in
the testimony of miners who favored the 100 degree temperatures during winter
months found at the bottom of the Smuggler Mine.
To further test the hypothesis of underground heat, Aspen may
drill down as much as 3,000 feet below ground. Phil Overeynder, Aspen’s public
works director, suggests there may be enough heat available to heat up to one
million square feet of commercial space and at costs at least comparable to
natural gas.
The Aspen City Council is enthusiastic, but city officials say
that more tests are necessary before they’re willing to commit to the test
drilling. Costs of moving forward are estimated at $1 million.
One Colorado town, Pagosa Springs, already taps hot water found
near the surface for heating of buildings. As well, a greenhouse is heated at
Mt. Princeton Hot Springs.
Wind turbines planned
KIRKWOOD MOUNTAIN, Calif. – California’s Kirkwood
Mountain Resort is hoping for a major installation of wind turbines.
Plans call for an array of 20 turbines that altogether will be
able to deliver 600 kilowatt hours daily. Later, if all goes as planned, the
blades on the turbines will be retrofitted, allowing the turbines to convert
more wind into electricity, 2 megawatts altogether.
In comparison, Massachusetts’ Jiminy Peak last year installed
just one turbine. It is, however, much taller, and produces 1.5 megawatts of
power.
Jiminy’s turbine has a maximum height of 375 feet, but is below
the summit. Those at Kirkwood would also be hidden somewhat, and would be much
shorter, 100 feet high.
Kirkwood’s situation is unusual. It is off the electrical grid
that connects most of North America. Instead, electricity is produced by
burning diesel. As such, the wind turbines are competing against high-priced
fuel instead of the more difficult market of coal-fired electricity, such as is
the case in the Rocky Mountain states.
Reno-based Synergy Power Corp. is the developer and is to sell
the power to Kirkwood. The area has strong winds year round, says Synergy vice
president Greg Jones, a skier who grew up cutting turns at Kirkwood. He told
Mountain Town News that the turbines operate at an optimal performance of not
quite 10 mph.
Higher on the mountain, winds can sometimes be ferocious
— twice last season reaching 190 mph. In such blasts, blades on the
turbines designed by Synergy can lie back, parallel to the ground.
Kirkwood officials claim they will be able to eliminate fossil
fuel generation for all but four months a year. “We could go almost eight
months carbon-free as a resort community with 600 to 700 residents,” chief
executive Dave Likins told the Sacramento Bee.
Kirkwood has signed a deal with a California company to improve
the energy efficiency of that power plant, to capture waste heat.
Wind turbines are also being studied at Snowmass and Vail.
Canmore celebrates 125
th
CANMORE, Alberta – Canmore is celebrating its 125
th
anniversary as a community, and a big parade marked the occasion. The community
has its roots in coal mining, and this year a new book, “Survival in Paradise:
A Century of Coal Mining,” was released, and a statue was unveiled, as was a
collection of paintings, which also celebrate the town’s coal-mining past.
